How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies

Released 2024. Director: Pat Boonnitipat

SEND OUT A GROUP TEXT, GET THE ENTIRE FAMILY to see How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies. Then ask each other: is there a price for looking after an elderly family member?

The idea will sound insulting to some people. After all, love for your family should be unconditional, free of any materialistic associations. What this movie does in a disarmingly entertaining way is examining a family in brutal honesty about money. I wouldn’t call How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies a feel-good drama, or a comedy, though the movie is certainly a crowd-pleaser. The top-grosser of 2024 in its homeland Thailand and a hit in some parts of Asia, this movie will find an even larger global audience now that it’s available to stream on Netflix.

This bittersweet and often amusing take on family relationships never loses sight of the sentimental nature of its plotlines. While keeping the movie naturalistic and avoiding any dramatic peaks and troughs, first-time director Pat Boonnitipat also inserts a dose of cynicism, measuring familial ties in monetary terms.

An inheritance is a gift following a death, usually divided among the family. Trouble is, some people feel they should be number-one on the list, which is a major motivation here. Grandma has been diagnosed with late-stage cancer and like we’ve seen in movies such as The Farewell, her family chooses not to tell her the truth to spare her the mental anguish. Almost overnight, attention on grandma increases. The customary Sunday lunch visit to grandma’s house is always missing a person or two, now everyone shows up, even bringing better food, not the usual cheap stuff.

Underneath this display of conviviality, their concern for the matriarch is tainted with an ulterior motive, with their eyes on grandma’s house. Grandma is no fool to their scheming and coaxes the truth out of her grandson M, who has even moved in on the pretext of giving grandma, so far managing perfectly fine by herself for years, some company.

Grandma is less than thrilled at the intrusion on her personal space. "You never visited," she says to her only grandson. "Why bother now?" Not so much a rhetorical question than a dismisssal. But she lets him stay and tolerates the garrulous young man who has no idea what grandma likes or how she lives. He gleefully brings grandma beef noodles, clueless that she doesn’t eat beef. He tries to please grandma by replenishing the water at the shrine of grandma’s deity but instead of taking water from a kettle, he uses the microwave. Sacrilegious!

To get in grandma’s good graces, M also needs to get up at 5am every day to help set up her congee stall to start cooking and selling. For a self-professed slacker who quit school so he could play games online all day in the hopes of monetising his pastime, M has to adjust to living amidst grandma’s musty belongings and what’s worse, there’s no computer. It’s a price the teenager is willing to pay for the big reward at the end.

Grandma is resigned to her fate and doesn’t seem particularly perturbed about her prognosis. She acts as if she doesn’t really care about her children’s lack of genuine wish to spend more time with her, yet she sits on the bench outside her house straining her neck hoping to see them arrive every Sunday.

The time spent between M and grandma and the depiction of their growing bond are some of the best parts of the movie. M gets used to living with grandma and her eccentricities. He’s always upbeat and willing, never complains about regular early morning trips to the hospital, and then wait in line for hours with grandma for her chemotherapy treatments.

M’s motivation comes from a cousin on his dad's side of the family who became her granddad’s live-in nurse in the months before his passing and ended up inheriting all of his wealth, to the consternation of her uncles and aunts.

While M hopes to reap a similar windfall from his grandma, he’s not the only one. Uncle Kiang, the richest among grandma’s three kids, arranges for grandma to live with his family. The perennially time-poor stockbroker who grumbles about attending the weekly lunch even finds time to accompany grandma to the temple. M’s single mother also adjusts her work schedule to accommodate grandma’s hospital visits, while Uncle Soei, the black sheep of the family who has no money and no job, has no compunction in stealing from his sick mother to service his debts.

I expected the movie to become all sentimental and predictable, with everyone shedding a tear and learning a life lesson in the end. There’s some of that, but also a surprise or two. Grandma bequeaths her house to one of them, and upsets everyone else. But as the family would discover later, her real gift has always been given while she was alive, and without the need for acknowledgement.

How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies is often engaging despite overlong and the editing could’ve been tightened. Boonnitipat manages to sidestep corny pratfalls and his treatment of a transactional approach to family kindness is ultimately light in cynicism and full on gratitude. The movie is affecting in parts because it openly treats the characters as scheming, frank about their motivations and honest about their affections and pragmatism. We understand their actions because though these are imperfect and contradictory people, they are real.

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