‘Human Resource’ review: A pregnant worker navigates a hostile world in Thai drama

Dir/scr: Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit. Thailand. 2025. 122 mins.

Insightful and intimate beneath its chilly, stylised surface, Thai drama Human Resource plays on the resonance of its English title: what becomes of individuals when people are treated as disposable material to fuel the machinery of the corporate world? While specifically Thai in certain cultural references, this Venice Horizons title largely depicts a scenario and a milieu that could belong anywhere in the globalised world, the tension between localism and universality providing a distinct bite. Written and directed by Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit (2018’s Die Tomorrow, 2022’s Fast And Feel Love), this coolly executed study centres on a tantalisingly enigmatic lead from Prapamonton Eiamchan, and deserves to score respectably in niche outlets.

The detached treatment of Fren’s antiseptic urban world has a touch of Haneke

Eiamchan plays Fren, a woman in the very early stages of pregnancy, whose doctor advises her to avoid stress. That’s easier said than done, however, as she works in HR for a company that seems to specialise in stress above all things – something that appears to have driven a recent recruit to make a sudden and worrying exit. Fren and her colleague Tenn (actor and singer Chanakan Rattana-Udom) need to find a replacement, but that is proving hard. New applicants are polyglot high achievers, super-confident of their market value and entitlement to high salaries. But the reality is different: the firm is offering lower wages, and wants people to work six days a week. Applicants will also have to cope with a volatile and abusive boss, who is little seen but whose personality hangs heavy in the air (the eventual new hire is an eager young woman played by Pimmada Chaisaksoen, from popular girl group PiXXie).

Tenn feels guilty about signing employees as cannon fodder: “HR,” he sighs, “is not a human buffet.”. Fren’s own feelings are less clear: as played by Eiamchan, she is oddly opaque, an effect heightened by Thamrongrattanarit’s habit of showing her in profile in key scenes. Meanwhile, her personal drama is somewhat eclipsed at home by the issues of her husband Thame (Paopetch Charoensook); she has not yet told him about her pregnancy, and is still wondering whether to have the child. Thame – sympathetic, but obsessively work-focused - is preoccupied with the product that he is trying to sell, a state-of-the-art stab-proof vest for protection in a threatening world.

The couple are beset with messages about it being a super-competitive environment – workers being urged to constantly up their skillset – and even their unborn child will need to get its foot in the door of the high-echelon education market. TV and radio continually blare bad news about the state of the nation and of the world in general – and, amid the mounting tension, it’s no surprise when a traffic incident, one that’s long been waiting to happen, becomes a flashpoint of dangerous conflict.

There’s a certain amount that we have seen before in international art cinema; the detached treatment of Fren’s antiseptic urban world has a touch of Haneke, for example. But here the picture is shown from a female point of view, and eventually from a specifically Thai one – notably when the couple visit Fren’s mother, and for the first time Human Resource seems to show an organic, emotionally sustaining world beyond the city’s steel-and-glass geometry.

Some ironies are perhaps more insistent than they need be: for example, the contrast between the intimacies of domestic life and the egregiously mendacious video that promotes Fren’s company as a bouncy, dancing happy family. But DoP Natdanai Naksuwarn draws touches of strange visual poetry from the cityscape: overhead shots of a lattice of urban roadways, armies of window cleaners suspended in the distance like spiders on the sides of office blocks. The elegant sound design – credited to Onecool Sound Studio – builds up a deadened ambience to play Fren’s work world and psychological space against the chaotic, stress-inducing racket that seeps into her private life, despite every protecting barrier.