Southeast Asia is home to a robust internet and telephone scam network, and The Red Line (now on Netflix) uses that real-life context as the basis for suspenseful drama. Thai director Sitisiri Mongkolsiri – who skewered upper-class foodie/chef culture in 2023 Netflix movie Hunger – sets this story primarily in Phuket, where three women, angry at being duped out of their savings, take things into their own hands when authorities tell them there isn’t much to be done about this particular crime, which often transcends international boundaries. The question here is whether the film is good enough so you movie-watchers at home out there don’t feel duped out of your time.
THE RED LINE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: “Just accept it.” That’s what a cop tells Orn (Nittha Jirayungyurn) after scam artists posing as police bilk her out of 500,000 baht (about 15,000 American dollars). Authorities insist there’s not much they can do about it, so their words are far from reassuring: “I can’t believe you fell for it.” And those words go round and round inside Orn’s head. She asks her husband Benz (Tul Tulyathep Uawithya) not to tell anyone about this as they drive their BMW to their upper-middle class home. They surely can afford it, but that’s not the point. She feels stupid. She feels shame. She has bad dreams about it. This is psychological trauma. Benz saying, “It’s been a month, time to move on” doesn’t help.
So Orn goes to a support group, where she meets Fai (Esther Supreeleela), a physical therapist who watched her down payment for a condo go bye-bye, and Wow (Chutima Maholakul), whose aging, and seemingly ailing, grandmother was bilked too. They’re all angry – at themselves, at the morally vacant creeps who did this to them, and at the do-nothing cops. This sounds like a Batmannish superhero origin story, but the movie is more grounded in reality than that, so these three women bond over their desire to do something about their predicament. What and how, they’re not sure yet. But Wow loops in her tech-savvy pal OJ (Tonhon Tantivejakul), and his attempt to triangulate the whereabouts of the ripoff organization gets their gears turning.
Now we jump back two weeks to Poipet, Cambodia, where Aood (Todsapol Maisuk) proves that even criminal scammer operations need middle management. After a phone operator hooks a patsy, they pass the caller to Aood, who gets on facetime dressed like a cop and finishes the deal. He reports to a Chinese mobster boss, Wei, and oversees trafficked people who are bullied into working for the operation, like Yui (Paowalee Pornpimon), who happened to be the one who scammed Wow’s grandma, and now feels the sting of her conscience. Aood resigns to return to his wife and son in Phuket, and when we see him greet his adorable little boy with a toy police car (please note the irony), for a moment, but only a moment, we wonder if he’s an OK guy.
However, contrary to good judgment, Aood sets up his own Phuket-based phone bank using the contact data he stole from the Chinese organization. And that bit of treachery – there’s no honor among thieves, I guess – is just one of his problems, because Orn, Fai and Wow have set up a surveillance operation targeting him. But what happens when the surveillance op has to become a sting op? When you’re a civilian and not a cop, the ops at some point have gotta stop.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Where’s The Beekeeper when you need him?
Performance Worth Watching: Jirayungyurn is the grounded, rock-solid foundation for The Red Line’s drama, and Pornpimon is excellent in the difficult role bridging both sides of the conflict.
Sex And Skin: A brief sex scene with no graphic visuals, but plenty of graphic slapping sounds.
Our Take: “No one here is Tom Cruise,” Orn reminds her cohorts at one point, as their scheme to take down Aood gets increasingly complicated. That prefaces a scene mirroring a Mission: Impossible scenario that’s significantly more low-tech and low-stakes, but almost as dangerous, and straddles the line between silly/funny farce and nailbiting suspense. That’s not the only time The Red Line raises plausibility concerns, and you begin to wonder if Mongkolsiri felt obligated to juice the film with action sequences to make it more exciting, theoretically speaking. He’s then in danger of undermining the pragmatic human drama of the story, so he overcorrects by amplifying the melodrama to a level just shy of soap opera. I understand how one might be upset about being defrauded, but the emotional exaggeration on display here tests the film’s credibility. Just how serious should we take this, anyway?
Well, The Red Line is serious enough to highlight a significant societal concern that the modern world currently struggles to address. Consider how physical burglary used to shake one’s foundational sense of security; now it’s the theft of digital assets, which creates a more complicated forensic puzzle, especially when international borders present legal and operational hurdles. Mongkolsiri and screenwriters Tinnapat Banyatpiyapoj and Kongdej Jaturanrasamee take pains to represent three classes of people on both sides of the conflict, to illustrate how both sides of the law roughly mirror each other in terms of the management of power. It’s a calculated dramatic maneuver, but it nevertheless works nicely to bolster the film’s thematic ambition.
By that token, if the bad guys can evade oversight, why can’t the good guys? The filmmakers layer another functional contrivance into the story, a cyber policeman who’s a step behind Orn, Wow and Fai, who, despite their amateur status, represent the influence of grassroots movements when institutions fail the greater good.
Mongkolsiri’s visual direction is smart even when his pacing is off – 135 minutes is a lot to swallow – and he sometimes tests the thin line between drawing out tension and taxing our patience. But the ideas churning and bubbling beneath the surface keep us involved as the protagonists question how and why they might confront dangerous criminals with a capacity for brutality. Especially Orn, who wrestles with the notions of revenge and closure – two great fallacies of human psychology – as she insists, “It’s not about the money – I want my life back.” Whether she’s chosen an advantageous route to that end, however, is fascinatingly uncertain. Perhaps she’s obsessed with “winning,” especially when losing, in the context of a world undermined by moral rot, just puts you in therapy.
Our Call: The Red Line is uneven, but smart and thematically vigorous when it needs to be. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.