This Crime Thriller With 100% on Rotten Tomatoes Places Every little thing on the Line for a Good, Daring Heist

Heist films usually evoke drama round vaults, jewels, and casinos with high-speed automobile chases that standard-setting classics like Ocean’s Eleven and The Italian Job usually incorporate for the high-stakes rigidity that the style takes delight in. A classroom and an examination corridor do not encourage confidence because the backdrop for such heart-pounding suspense. However Unhealthy Genius (2017), a Thai crime thriller helmed by Nattawut Poonpiriya, reimagines educational dishonest as an adrenaline-fueled heist journey.

Impressed by real-life news reports of an SAT cheating scandal in Asia, the movie grew to become one in every of Thailand’s most profitable films and spawned varied variations, together with a TV collection, a well-received 2024 American remake starring Benedict Wong, and a novelization. Unhealthy Genius acquired a common nod of approval from movie fanatics, earning a deserved 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

‘Unhealthy Genius’ Is a Uncommon Heist Film With Exams on the Heart of the Motion

Unhealthy Genius tells the story of Lynn (Chutimon Chuengcharoensukying), a lower-middle-class, ingenious teenage scholar who jumps on a possibility to plan an elaborate international examination cheating scheme to make millions. Poonpiriya’s movie begins with the geeky Lynn and her father (Thaneth Warakulnukroh) within the workplace of a faculty principal. They’re exploring choices to have Lynn admitted to the well-to-do college that would allow her to safe scholarships to review overseas. Sadly, the college’s tuition price is revealed to be approach above her father’s monetary skills, however fortunately, Lynn is obtainable a scholarship. She shortly befriends the kind-hearted and eager-to-please Grace (Eisaya Hosuwan), who introduces her to Pat (Teeradon Supapunpinyo), her rich boyfriend. A friendship turns into a enterprise, with Grace and Pat paying Lynn to permit them to repeat her solutions throughout exams and ultimately scaling as much as admit extra wealthy college students into Lynn’s “piano lessons” — so known as as a result of she makes use of classical music concerto notes as her examination room code language together with her shoppers.

Lynn’s dishonest on the college stage is busted after Financial institution (Chanon Santinatornkul), Lynn’s equally gifted competitor additionally on scholarship, studies his suspicions to the principal, inflicting Lynn to lose her scholarship. Grace and Pat have to cross a world examination to review in Boston. Determined, they flip to Lynn, who devises a intelligent scheme utilizing time zones to entry and leak examination solutions globally. Satisfying the adage that everybody has a value, Lynn recruits the morally upright Financial institution to their scheme, hammering house the pragmatism of the realities of their world, the place integrity takes a again seat. For Lynn and her accomplices, failure would imply monetary and reputational break, and probably jail time.

Past the thrills of a fraudulent syndicate, the movie presents social commentary about ethical dilemmas, class disparities, and the place of lecturers in life’s success, whereas commenting on the darkish facet of training. As soon as considered a social equalizer, the movie means that training has turn into a corrupt enterprise that prioritizes income. The movie touches on different coming-of-age points, equivalent to single-parenting youngsters. What actually units the movie aside is the way it effortlessly turns one of the boring and least-liked college actions right into a gripping cinematic expertise. Poonpiriya’s path makes use of motivated digicam actions with fast precision photographs that replicate the mounting strain on the shoulders of the movie’s characters. Whether or not it’s a close-up of Lynn’s snapping fingers as she performs an conceivable piano for her “shoppers” to discern solutions or a sweeping shot that exhibits how heavy her accountability is below surveillance, Unhealthy Genius delivers sequences which are as intense as you will discover in any high motion blockbuster.

‘Unhealthy Genius’ Exposes Coming-of-Age Class Disparities and the Darkish Aspect of Educational Success

Poonpiriya’s thriller explores societal structures, particularly class inequality. What motivates Lynn isn’t greed however frustration that stems from a system that exploits her brilliance. Regardless of being provided a scholarship to assist keep and lift the college’s standing, she realizes that the college remains to be extorting cash from her determined and comparatively poor schoolteacher father. She discerns that cash guidelines the world and justifies her determination to cheat in exams together with her need to minimize her father’s monetary burden and the invention that lecturers, too, are pushed by cash after she finds out that some leak exams to wealthy youngsters who pay them for remedial lessons. The movie delivers its social commentary with a pointy and entertaining edge that hammers its message with out sounding preachy, save for its ending that considerably seems to unnecessarily try to attain ethical factors.

Lynn and her accomplices’ struggles spotlight how everybody performs a novel position on life’s grand stage. Unhealthy Genius is a uncommon gem that not solely retains viewers on the sting of their seats but additionally forces them to confront uncomfortable truths concerning the techniques they dwell in.

Unhealthy Genius is presently accessible to stream on Netflix within the U.S.

WATCH ON NETFLIX