How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies (หลานม่า)
Loading...
I absolutely wept in this movie. Of its 127min runtime, I probably cried 120min of it.
No, the entire movie is not sad. The first half of the movie is actually quite funny. But I still cried throughout because it made me vividly remember my own grandmother. Seeing the wrinkled hands on the screen or hearing the penultimate grandma question “have you eaten yet?” slashed my heart open.
This one was a special cry. A cry I actively sought out-- as a way to grieve my grandmother who passed away this past November.
It’s almost been a year since she passed. It’s a surreal feeling, and is also my first time experiencing the loss of a loved one. And I’ve learned so much about grief through it.
I’ve learned that it hurts so intensely, especially at the beginning, but then over time, it gets better. And then just when you think that you won’t feel that intensity of feeling again, out of nowhere you do. You accidentally hear her voice in an old video, so alive….so… exactly as you remember her… but the only thing that’s different now is that … she’s no longer here. And that intense pain, the pain that you didn’t think you could bear again, comes rushing back.
That’s how it felt watching this movie. It unearthed so much emotion. I loved this movie so much.
If you’ve seen any of the social media posts about this movie, you knew that it was going to be an ugly cry. People all over the world were posting their ‘befores’ and ‘afters’ pictures with tears streaming down their faces. In the theater I was in, you could hear sniffles and people blowing their noses almost the entire time. And I’m not sure if this is intentionally done at every showing of this movie, but after the movie ended, my theater did not turn on the lights. They kept the lights off through the entirely of the rolling credits. And not a single person got up to leave. We were all too incapacitated and weeping in our seats as the credits played. It was…. beautiful.
I absolutely lost it during the scene when he is directing his grandma’s casket to her burial site.
The sudden onset of grief you see on M’s face, is a face and feeling I know too well. It reminded me of the first time I visited my grandma’s grave after her funeral. I ran out of the car to her gravesite, and I cried and wept and talked to her like she could hear me.
The movie not only reminded me of my grandma, but the wildest thing for me, is that I don’t think it really sensationalizes the experience of having and losing an aging grandparent, amidst tricky family dynamics. With a name like “How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies” you could worry that this will be a cheap cry-- a movie fabricated solely for this purpose. And though, yes everyone cried, I didn’t consider it a fabricated cry at all. As someone who recently went through a similar experience, what made me cry was actually how painfully accurate the movie was. Nothing was over dramaticized for the sake of it.
You’ll probably see this 15 times on this site, but once again, grandma I love you and miss you every day.
