by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Jeff Satur, Pongsakorn Mettarikanon, Srida Puapimol, Engfa Waraha, Harit Buayoi
Intro:
…. harsh, spiky, and quite off-putting on the surface, but cracking it open reveals a lot of tenderness and even fleeting sweetness.
Thailand has a complicated history with the LGBTQ+ community. While they remain one of the culturally friendlier nations on the globe (albeit with a reputation still influenced by ladyboy stereotypes), its official stance is something else. In 2021, the Constitutional Court officially ruled that not only is marriage solely defined as being between a man and a woman, but that gay people are essentially a different species from everyone else (âi sát for that one, champs). Legislation to officially recognise same-sex marriages has been in the works since 2023, but between an untimely parliament dissolution and a lack of royal assent at present, it isn’t definitive law at time of writing.
This is the background for The Paradise of Thorns, a Thai dramatic thriller about what results from not being recognised. It starts out with a look at the idyllic romance of durian farmers Thongkam (Jeff Satur) and Sek (Pongsakorn Mettarikanon), but don’t let its initial warmth pull you in too much, because things go downhill quickly and consistently. After tragedy strikes, Thongkam is left alone, but because the system only regards him as a ‘friend’ of Sek’s, their farm goes to Sek’s mother Saeng (Srida Puapimol) and her adopted daughter Mo (Engfa Waraha).
What follows is akin to the mind games present in The Favourite, where both Thongkam and Mo go to great (and oft disturbing) lengths to curry favour with Saeng so they can claim the property for themselves. As delightfully bitchy as the interactions can get, with Satur and Waraha doing brilliantly with the icy delivery, director/co-writer Naruebet ‘Boss’ Kuno never lets them become outright caricatures. Their actions are bloody-minded through and through (and legitimately go too far during the purpled bruise of a climax), but he makes it absolutely clear that these acts of raw desperation are just that, and there are reasons for them all.
The film gains emotional traction from its proximity to the larger discussion of LGBT rights and recognition, but in the process, it also casts a wide net over all the other ways that people can be driven to do the unthinkable after being denied their own personhood.
Thongkam has his deep-set (and mostly justifiable) grievances about how a legal technicality is keeping him from a life he built with his lover, while Mo struggles with having nothing in her own name, resorting to parasitic attachments to others in order to lay claim to anything. She has a smile that feels like it could rip reality in half, but there’s an unshakeable pain lurking just behind it. Saeng shares in this too, with her decidedly harsh tones balanced out with the grim understanding of why she needs a caregiver like Mo in the first place. Even the closest this story has to a true innocent, in Mo’s younger brother Jingna (Harit Buayoi), still gets pulled into the vortex of negative karma that has ensnared everyone else.
The Paradise of Thorns, much like its central fruit, is harsh, spiky, and quite off-putting on the surface, but cracking it open reveals a lot of tenderness and even fleeting sweetness. The brutality exhibited through its central performances and the film craft (Haulampong Riddim and Vichaya Vatanasapt’s soundtrack is wound up so damn tight, it sounds like someone’s about to lose an eye) is couched by moments of genuine warmth and relentless empathy, even when the characters are at their utter worst. It’s a tragedy in the best way (or worst way, depending on how you look at it), in that it all results from what, in a better world, would’ve been avoidable from the start. An entire family is lost, and all for the want of a single slip of paper.
