How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies (2024)
★★★★½ — How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies (2024)
There's a moment somewhere in the middle of How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies where you realise, almost without noticing, that you've completely stopped judging the main character. M starts this film as someone you'd roll your eyes at: a young man with no money, no real plan, and the audacity to move in with his terminally ill grandmother specifically because he thinks he'll end up in her will. It's a rotten thing to do. And yet, here you are, an hour in, rooting for him with everything you've got. That quiet shift is what this Thai film does better than almost anything I've seen in recent memory.
I've been working my way through an A-Z World Movie Tour, picking films from countries I haven't explored enough on screen, and Thailand gave me this. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. My previous experience with Thai cinema has ranged from the breathless action of Ong-Bak (2003) to the genuinely uncomfortable Only God Forgives (2013), which at least had Thailand as its backdrop. This is something else altogether. Something far quieter, and far more devastating.
The premise sounds cynical written down, and the film knows it. M is skint, his grandmother is dying, and he does the maths. He moves in, takes care of her, and waits. What the film then does, with enormous patience and no small amount of wit, is pull the rug out from under that cynicism entirely. Not by making M suddenly noble, but by making his grandmother real. She's played with such warmth and sly dignity that you can't reduce her to a plot device, and M, stuck in her orbit day after day, can't either. She's stubborn and funny and a little bit sharp-tongued, and she sees right through him, and she lets him stay anyway. That's the film's secret weapon: she's no saint, and neither is he, and they find each other anyway.
The pacing is something I want to talk about because it's so deliberately unhurried in a way that pays off completely. This is a film that trusts the quiet moments: a shared meal eaten in near silence, an awkward attempt to help with something personal, the way two people can build a kind of shorthand without ever saying anything important out loud. It reminded me, in the best way, of Yi Yi (2000), that Taiwanese masterwork about family and the way life slips past us. Both films understand that the big emotional moments land harder when you've been made to sit still and pay attention first.
What keeps How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies from becoming manipulative is its honesty. It doesn't flinch from the messiness of family: the relatives who hover for the same reasons M does, the old grudges that surface at the worst possible times, the guilt of not having been there earlier. There's a whole ecosystem of complicated human behaviour around this woman's deathbed, and the film captures it without judging any of it too harshly, because it recognises that most of us are a mixture of selfishness and love, usually at the same time.
By the final act, I was genuinely undone. Not in a manipulated, cheap way, but in the way you feel when something true catches you off guard. The ending doesn't cheat. Life doesn't hand out tidy resolutions, and this film doesn't either. What it does say, quietly but with complete conviction, is that time is the thing, and what you do with the time you have is all that really matters.
I laughed more than I expected to. I cried more than I was prepared for. And I came out the other side thinking about my own family, which is the mark of a film that's actually doing something.
Four and a half stars. Don't sleep on this one.
Rating: ★★★★½ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2025-09-11
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Thailand: Only God Forgives (2013) · Street Fighter (1994) · Ong-Bak (2003) · Ziam (2025)
More from the 2020s: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · The Long Walk (2025) · Americana (2023)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
