Review of Bad Genius / ฉลาดเกมส์โกง (2017), directed by Nattawut Poonpiriya

I had never really been in Thai, or Southeast Asian cinema, for the hottest minute. I do not know why I had not been watching an entire region’s cinema when I truly love global cinema for the aspect that you can learn quite a bit about the culture and the world the characters are living within by the way a film is set up.

I grew up in an area with a lot of Filipinos, but never had the chance to be truly exposed to Filipino or SEA culture until I took a free Indonesian class. That really opened the floodgates because I loved the diversity in Indonesia, which then led me down the rabbit hole of SEA as a whole.

Since I have been watching and writing about SEA cinema for a bit now for work, I ended up landing on watching Bad Genius after seeing the hype online about the movie.

And, as my preliminary thoughts, I’m genuinely surprised this movie didn’t gain more attention in the West. It truly is fantastic. Before I spill anymore about the film, let us simply dive right into this review.

A Thai student excelling in academics establishes a crime ring to cheat on international exams.

The protagonist of Bad Genius is Lynn, a student who attends a competitive school because her father works there. There is a catch, though: the headmaster of the school is charging him more than she should because of it, putting Lynn’s family in a more dire financial situation.

The driving force that kickstarts this story is that Lynn’s friend asks her to help cheat on an exam, because Lynn is one of the top students in the school, giving them (and the friend’s wealthy boyfriend) the idea to start a cheating ring for financial profit.

And so they do so. But it all goes down when the top student at the school, Bank, rats Lynn out to the headmaster. In turn, Lynn gets banned from applying to the competitive scholarship that will allow her to study abroad for college, while she also loses he scholarship to attend the school.

Her father is disappointed, but lets it slide. However, she is drawn back into the cheating ring by Pat, the girl’s boyfriend, and they recruit Bank into their scheme after some thugs beat him up, thus making him late to the exam that would get him a scholarship.

They then eye a a very important international exam in Australia, using time zone differences to get the answers to students in Thailand, but Bank gets caught halfway through the test while Lynn memorizes everything herself and sends it to Thailand.

She claims not to know Bank and gets to go home, but finds herself forever traumatized by the events that went down in Australia. While her two friends are able to go to competitive schools, her score was considered void because she left the test room to send the answers, leaving her in a bad situation.

Bank, too, is forever changed as he was caught cheating and no longer be applicable for anything.

With the money from his end of the scheme, he upgrades his mother’s business, but then tries to blackmail Lynn into continuing a life full of crime and cheating. That’s when, at the end of the movie, she walks away from everything and comes clean to the authorities.

What fascinates me about Bad Genius is that not only does it grip you and absorb you into the world that it creates, but it also manages commentary on subtle class dynamics.

The boyfriend, Pat, is cheating but already wealthy. He uses his wealth to beat up an innocent person (Bank) and force them further into the scheme his girlfriend and he have created. While the girlfriend shows remorse when Lynn says she does not want to be friends anymore, he does not seem to care one bit.

Lynn and Bank are the ones suffering the most from the consequences of this, and they both are the ones shown as being the most financially needy.

Dependent on the scholarships that keep them in school, they are the top two students for their abilities and grit to begin with, but because they fall into the game that the wealthy are playing, they becomes victims.

It’s almost a tale of exploitation, which is very common in today’s society if it isn’t obvious already. In order to try and better themselves financially, they turned to dishonest means, but only they paid the price at the end of the day,

Overall Thoughts

It is a solid movie, I will give it that. It keeps you entertained throughout its entire runtime, Lynn is an interesting character to follow, and it offers the viewer quite a bit to think about afterwards.

It’s worth watching if you have a Netflix subscription, so check it out if you get the chance. I’ll definitely be watching more Thai films in the future now because I was impressed with this movie.

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