Review | Happy Old Year film review: cold-hearted declutterer sees error of her ways in Thai drama
- Chutimon Chuengcharoensukying plays a would-be interior designer back from Sweden who sets out to impose her minimalist aesthetic on the cluttered family home
- She soon runs into resistance and comes to the realisation that she hasn’t got over the family’s abandonment by their father. Chutimon brings joy to a cold role
3/5 stars
Japanese decluttering consultant Marie Kondo found global fame with her books and Netflix series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, in which she encourages viewers to throw away unnecessary objects in their homes that don’t “spark joy” when held on to.
Happy Old Year, directed by Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit ( Heart Attack ), arrives as a direct rebuke to Kondo’s theory, arguing that everything we own is tied to a specific memory or person that deserves to be cherished.
She plays Jean, who returns to Bangkok after three years in Sweden with the hope of becoming an interior designer. The first project for her minimalist aesthetic is the family home, a two-storey store conversion filled with a lifetime’s worth of seemingly unimportant clutter.
Jean’s primary target is a piano, which has gone unplayed since her father left many years earlier, but her mother (Apasiri Nitibhon) and brother, Jay (Thirawat Ngosawang) are reluctant to part with the sole remembrance of the man who abandoned them.