Ziam (2025)
★★ — Ziam (2025)
Thailand has built a formidable reputation for action cinema over the past two decades, producing films that put raw physicality front and centre and trust their audiences to appreciate the work that goes into every punch and kick. The country's martial arts heritage, Muay Thai in particular, has been a gift to filmmakers willing to build a premise around it rather than simply dress the background with it. Ong-Bak (2003) remains the high-water mark for that tradition, the film that convinced international audiences Thai action could stand alongside anything coming out of Hong Kong or Hollywood. Ziam, released in 2025 and produced by Kantana Motion Pictures, arrives as a genre hybrid trying to stake its own claim in that lineage, strapping a zombie-horror premise onto a Muay Thai chassis and asking whether the combination adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
Director Kulp Kaljareuk frames the story around a former Muay Thai fighter who finds himself pitched against a horde of the undead in a fight to keep his girlfriend alive. At 96 minutes the film keeps things lean, which suits the material. The cast is headed by Prin Suparat, a familiar face in Thai television and film who has the physical presence the role demands, alongside Nuttanicha Dungwattanawanich, Wanvayla Boonnithipaisit, Johnny Anfone and Pimmada Boriruksuppakorn. The combination of genres is not entirely new territory globally, and anyone with a passing knowledge of recent action-horror will clock the obvious reference points before the opening act is out. Thailand itself has shown it can handle horror with real intelligence, as the unsettling body-horror of Tiger Stripes (2023) demonstrated, so the ingredients on paper here are not unpromising. Whether Kulp Kaljareuk manages to blend the martial arts spectacle and the horror elements into something coherent is, of course, the question. His film also sits alongside a broader recent wave of Southeast Asian genre cinema that has been finding eager audiences well outside the region, which gives Ziam a reasonable platform even if the film itself has to earn the attention.
The Raid and Train to Busan had a kid. That's literally all you need to know. Predictable malarkey.
And honestly, that sums it up better than a longer essay would. There is something almost admirable about a film that knows exactly what it is, but knowing what you are and doing it well are two very different things. For me, the Muay Thai sequences are where Ziam earns whatever goodwill it generates, because when Prin Suparat is actually fighting, the film has the good sense to get out of its own way. Everything else feels like connective tissue borrowed from better films, and I kept thinking of the sheer controlled brutality on display in The Raid 2 (2014) as a reminder of how high that bar actually sits. If you come in wanting ninety-six minutes of zombies getting their jaws rearranged by a trained fighter, you will get roughly what you paid for. Just do not expect to remember much of it on the walk home.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2025 | Watched: 2025-07-13
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Ziam (2025) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US
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