THE STORY – Working in HR, Fren closely observes people’s lives through interviews with numerous young new hires at her unjust company. No one knows she’s one month pregnant — and quietly grappling with whether to bring a child into this difficult world.
THE CAST – Prapamonton Eiamchan, Paopetch Charoensook, Chanakan Rattana-Udom & Pimmada Chaisaksoen
THE TEAM – Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 122 Minutes
Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit has long occupied a rare space in contemporary cinema: a filmmaker whose works look deceptively airy, sometimes even frivolous until you realize, almost without noticing, that he has quietly dismantled you. His latest feature “Human Resource,” which just premiered in Venice’s Horizons section, carries on that tradition but in perhaps his most sobering and personal register yet. It’s at once a film about labor and about life, about the invisible infrastructures that eat away at our days, and the private decisions we carry in silence.
The premise is disarmingly simple. Fren (Prapamonton Eiamchan) works in human resources at a mid-level company. She screens candidates, asks standard questions, and shuffles through CVs. She appears professional, competent, and quietly composed. But she’s also one month pregnant and no one, least of all her husband, knows. Across the next two months as she interviews anxious applicants, manages an absent colleague, and navigates the demands of her boss and her marriage, a profound unease gnaws at her: should she bring a child into a world that seems to be collapsing under the weight of its own systems?
What makes “Human Resource” extraordinary is how Nawapol builds this existential dread not through melodrama, but through form. The film’s pacing is glacial, even punishing, with long takes that stretch into silence and scenes that seem to repeat with only the smallest variations. For stretches, nothing “happens” in the conventional sense. Fren asks questions, types into her computer, listens, and nods. Yet it is precisely this unyielding rhythm that makes the experience so piercing. We’re forced into Fren’s reality, into the sensation of time being siphoned off by a machine that never gives back. The sound design is equally oppressive. Office chatter, typing, the hollow echo of an interview room: these banal noises become suffused with melancholy. Nawapol preserves every pause, every breath, every awkward silence, turning them into reminders of what cannot be said. Fren’s private life is no less suffocating: her husband Thame (Paopetch Charoensook) dominates conversations, blind to his own casually controlling impulses. He insists on his needs, his pleasures, his perspective. She acquiesces. Even the film’s recurring visual motif – driving the wrong way down a one-way street – crystallizes the imbalance: he is determined to hold ground, she quietly yields.
What’s remarkable is how much weight Eiamchan carries with so little outward expression. Fren is a character of concealment, her emotions tightly sealed beneath a mask of stoicism. Yet the cracks are visible if you look closely enough: a swallow, a twitch, the briefest hesitation before speaking. Eiamchan gives one of the year’s most finely tuned performances, embodying the paradox of being emotionally transparent while never actually saying what you feel. Charoensook, meanwhile, is terrific at channeling a kind of everyday entitlement that never tips into villainy, making Thame both recognizable and insidious.
Thematically, the film fits neatly into Nawapol’s ongoing fascination with time and mortality. Where one his earlier films “Die Tomorrow” meditated on death, “Human Resource” turns toward birth. Fren’s pregnancy becomes not just a plot point but a prism through which every other detail refracts. Each job interview is less about the candidates than about the world they reflect: a world of insecurity, exhaustion, and dwindling opportunities. The unborn child is the silent witness to these conversations, as though each anxious answer is an orientation into the reality awaiting them outside the womb. Visually, Nawapol opts for minimalist realism. The cinematography is steady, unembellished, often locked into tight close-ups or mid-shots that refuse relief. The office is drab, claustrophobic; the home, though brighter, is no less confining. Occasionally, the austerity is broken by a photograph or a brief video clip of Fren smiling, carefree, and alive in a way she no longer seems to be. These moments land with devastating force: they remind us of a personal identity buried under routine and submission, a woman who once laughed freely but now lives suspended in anxious stasis.
For some, this deliberate withholding of dramatic release may prove alienating. Indeed, certain festival audiences found the second half meandering, even inert, as though the narrative stalled rather than unfolded. But to dismiss this as a flaw is to miss the point. The lack of development is the narrative. Nawapol is not interested in the climactic moment when everything changes; he is interested in the condition of living in a world where nothing changes, where exhaustion accumulates day after day until it becomes indistinguishable from identity. The very structure of the film mimics the suffocating loop of late capitalism: repetition without reward and endless labor without resolution.
Yet “Human Resource” is not devoid of humanity. There are flashes of humor, moments of gentle absurdity that catch you off guard. The film’s comedy is never biting; it’s instead the kind of dry, almost accidental humor that arises in the monotony of work. And there’s tenderness too, often buried but unmistakable. A scene with Fren’s mother cuts through the fog with clarity – she urges her daughter to stop being a people pleaser, at least for the sake of her child. In this brief exchange we glimpse the possibility of another life, even if it remains distant.
By the end, Fren remains an enigma. We’re never given full access to her thoughts. Nawapol refuses to hand us a psychological key. Instead, we’re invited to project, to intuit, to fill in the blanks. What exactly is Fren feeling at any given moment? The answer is both everything and nothing. She is exhausted and conflicted, perhaps hopeful or perhaps resigned. Her unreadability becomes the film’s final gesture of honesty: in a world this uncertain, clarity itself is a luxury. “Human Resource” is not for every viewer. Its melancholy can feel overwhelming and its slow rhythms frustrating. But for those willing to sink into its quiet despair, the film emerges as one of Nawapol’s most piercing works – a meditation on labor, motherhood, and the unbearable weight of existing in systems designed to grind us down. It is bleak, yes, but also brilliant – cinematic act of quiet defiance that lingers like a question you cannot shake.
When the credits roll, you may walk out with a lump in your throat, unable to say exactly why. And that, perhaps, is Nawapol’s greatest gift: to leave us haunted not by what he tells us, but by what he dares us to feel.
