Karl Puschmann: Is Netflix’s violent and weird 6ixtynin9 this year’s Squid Game?
OPINION
When it comes to film and television, I quite enjoy a bit of the old ultraviolence. There’s a lot of that in 6ixtynin9. Nice.
Streaming on Netflix, and adapted from a movie of the same name, is this new dark crime thriller from Thailand that features many sudden splashes of blood and much oddly comedic weirdness.
On one hand, the show adheres to a gritty and believable realism, with lots of on-location filming on Thailand’s streets, homes and dingy apartment blocks. But on the other, it also dives into the surreal - like how it follows any newly dispatched thugs or gangsters into the afterlife, where a St Peter-type figure verifies how they died and sniggers as they confirm that, yes, it was a woman who killed them.
Damn near every episode of 6ixtynin9: The Series has had a moment that’s caught me out. Its increasingly intense story will be chugging along and then, it’ll simply lurch into something so out of left-field that I question my own eyes, along with the writers’ sanity. These interludes often left me scratching my head in bewilderment as I attempted to puzzle out what in blazes was going on.
It turns out, however, that the writers are as sane as a window pane. Every single instance of these little WTF moments were “gotchas”. Neat little cinematic tricks that’d catch me off-guard before segueing into perfect sense.
For example, there’s a bit where a new character strolls down the road, obliviously avoiding a series of comedic though potentially life-ending mishaps. He gets home, sits down at his kitchen table and then meets his fate in a pathetic yet gruesomely over-the-top way. The scene’s played for laughs and the extreme tonal shift is jarring. I didn’t know what the heck was going on. And then the camera pulled out, revealing the whole scene to be a commercial for life insurance playing on the TV.
It’s the exact sort of thing that would have been completely at home on the UK’s brilliantly anarchic 80s sitcom The Young Ones. Just like that comedy classic, weirdness seeps into every part of 6ixtynin9: The Series.
For a show that left me confused a lot of the time, the story is incredibly straightforward. Toom, the show’s heroine, is laid off from her job in insurance due to Covid cutbacks. She returns to her apartment in a dour building where the lift doesn’t work and sinks into a miserable depression. The next morning, there’s a knock on her door. She opens it but nobody’s there - only a mysterious box.
Inside is ฿1 million, which equates to roughly $50,000 in our money, and it is this that drives the plot. Two gangsters show up to Toom’s apartment looking for the cash, but through some good fortune on Toom’s part are brutally dispatched. Then more gangsters show up looking for them as Toom tries to flee the country with the cash.
Toom is the star, but the series also follows a number of others in the underworld she finds herself in. There’s the gang’s boss, the gang’s goons, her arty-druggy neighbours and a guy whose side hustles include selling passports and tattooing. And all of them are very concerned about procuring the box of baht.
Being from Thailand and not Hollywood, 6ixtynin9 is a little rough around the edges and raw. Especially considering the level of oddity and non-sequiturs it contains. It can sometimes be hard to follow along as it jumps around.
And while this all sounds like the show would be moving at breakneck speed, this is not the case. It’s often quite slow.
It certainly won’t be for everyone, but I’m hooked. I haven’t seen all that much media out of Thailand, so it’s been great to be exposed to their take on storytelling and filmmaking in a genre that I very much like. Not to mention the joy of seeing another way of life through the show’s many establishing shots and locations.
It may not be as slick as Netflix’s other foreign breakthroughs like South Korea’s Squid Game or Spain’s Money Heist, but the way its threads are knotting together is proving intriguing and entertaining. The mix of violence, dark comedy and surreal weirdness may not always come together, but 6ixtynin9 is an enjoyable experience.