How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies
2024 · Pat Boonnitipat
For when you need a good cry that leaves you warmer, not hollowed out — and maybe makes you call your grandmother afterward. Bring tissues; this one has a reputation for a reason.
What it's about
M, a university dropout with no money and no plan, moves in to care for his terminally ill grandmother — privately hoping to position himself for the inheritance, since in his Teochew-Chinese family in old Bangkok, the arithmetic of who owes what to whom is never spoken but always running. Between pre-dawn congee sales and hospital visits, the transaction starts turning into something he didn't budget for.
The experience
Gentle, patient, and quietly funny for a long while — then it wrecks you. The tears feel earned rather than extracted, because the film refuses to sentimentalize either the boy's motives or the grandmother's flinty pride.
Performances
Usha Seamkhum, in her seventies and essentially new to the screen, is remarkable as the grandmother — unsentimental, sharp-tongued, proud — and it's her refusal to beg for sympathy that makes the film so devastating.
The craft
Pat Boonnitipat's debut directs with enormous patience: long everyday scenes of cooking, bickering, and bus rides that quietly accumulate into a portrait of how families actually show love — through duty, food, and money. The specificity of its Thai-Chinese world is the secret of its universal reach.
Why it matters
It became a pan-Asian phenomenon, breaking box-office records from Indonesia to Singapore and going viral for reducing entire theaters to sobs — proof that a modest family drama could outdraw blockbusters across a continent.
A broke university dropout moves in with his ailing grandmother, the ledger of inheritance quietly open in his head — and Pat Boonnitipat's debut feature watches, with enormous patience and no cynicism, as the transaction turns into something harder to name. Produced by Bangkok's GDH studio, it belongs to a Thai tradition of unabashedly emotional mainstream drama, but its texture is specific: a Teochew-Chinese family in an old Bangkok neighborhood, congee sold before dawn, the unspoken arithmetic of which child owes what to whom. Usha Seamkhum, in her seventies and essentially new to the screen, gives the grandmother a flinty, unsentimental pride that keeps every tear honest. That honesty paid off spectacularly: the film became a pan-Asian phenomenon, breaking box-office records from Indonesia to Singapore as audiences filmed themselves weeping in the aisles, and carried Thailand's hopes to the Oscars. What lingers isn't the crying but the observation — how care work falls to women, how inheritance becomes love's crudest proxy, and how much family history a single house on a noisy street can hold.
Lines of influence
- Tokyo Story (1953) — Establishes the tatami-height static frame and elliptical patience with which a family's quiet neglect of its elders is observed rather than dramatized — the restraint the seed inherits.
- Late Spring (1949) — Founds the filial-duty melodrama in which a younger relative's obligation to an aging parent is staged in a single home through withheld emotion and reaction shots, not confrontation.
- Pushing Hands (1992) — Confines the collision between an elderly Chinese parent and a self-interested younger generation to one household, mining filial duty from cramped domestic blocking.
- Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) — Routes Chinese family obligation and generational friction through food and the shared table as the recurring set-piece of care, a device the seed reuses around Grandma's cooking.
- Shower (1999) — Builds a filial-duty comedy-melodrama around an adult child returning to physically care for an ailing parent, converting bodily caregiving into the film's central emotional currency.
- Yi Yi (2000) — Uses a grandmother's stroke and coma as the structuring bookend that gathers and exposes a whole family, the same illness-as-catalyst architecture the seed adopts.
- Still Walking (2008) — Compresses an entire family drama into one house across a single visit, staging buried resentment and love through kitchen-and-hallway movement and mealtime small talk.
- Ilo Ilo (2013) — Renders a care-work relationship inside a Chinese household with unsentimental restraint, a debut feature that treats domestic labor as the site of unspoken love — the seed's exact register.
- After the Storm (2016) — Places a feckless adult grandchild inside the grandmother's apartment for the duration, extracting warmth and reckoning from a single-setting observational patience.
- Bad Genius (2017) — Models GDH's mainstream Thai craft of naturalistic non-star performance and tightly engineered emotional beats that the seed's studio pedigree directly extends.
- Shoplifters (2018) — Frames family as an economic arrangement in which care and inheritance are transactional, exposing the money-versus-love tension the seed's title foregrounds.
- A Sun (2019) — Fractures a single family unit through restrained, observational melodrama that withholds catharsis, the same undemonstrative Taiwanese-inflected tone the seed pursues.
- Happy Old Year (2019) — Applies GDH's clean domestic realism to grief and a mother-child bond, letting objects and household space carry memory rather than dialogue.
- The Farewell (2019) — Turns a dying grandmother into the magnet that draws a scheming, loving family together, staging it through static meal-table framing and a comic-melodramatic deception over her care.
- Minari (2020) — Centers a grandmother–grandchild bond within an immigrant family's daily labor, observed with the same restrained, non-sentimental patience and specificity of dialect and food.