Can Dragging Your Dying Grandma to Nine Temples in One Day Actually Buy Her Immortality?
Imagine your dad waking you up on a Saturday morning with news that sounds like a cursed chain email come to life. A psychic told him that his mother is going to die unless the family drags her through nine different Buddhist shrines before the sun goes down. You are not allowed to stay home. You are not allowed to suggest that a frail senior citizen should probably rest in bed with a bowl of soup and some electrolyte water. Instead, you get packed into a rental van alongside uncles arguing about land investments, an irritated grandmother who wants everyone to leave her alone, and a collection of gift buckets stuffed with yellow robes and instant coffee. Welcome to the world of director Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s feature film debut, 9 Temples to Heaven.
The film landed at prestigious festivals like Cannes Directors' Fortnight and the New York Film Festival. Critics have showered it with awards chatter, calling it Thailand's potential contender for the Academy Awards. Serious cinema fans love to discuss its gorgeous long shots, its delicate examination of Buddhist ritual, and its slow-burning pace. Yet look beneath all the highbrow festival prestige and you will find an absurd comedy about family dysfunction that everyone on the planet can relate to. The movie asks a hilariously awkward question: what happens when your desperate bid to earn points with the universe turns into the road trip from hell?
To get the joke, you have to understand the sheer cultural weight of the number nine in Thailand. In the Thai language, the word for nine sounds almost identical to the word for taking a step forward or making progress. Because of that linguistic quirk, the number has become a powerhouse symbol of good luck. For decades, locals have embarked on "nine temple tours". The idea is simple: visit nine holy spots between dawn and dusk, make offerings to monks, chant prayers, pour water to honor your ancestors, and collect so much positive cosmic karma that you effectively wipe your slate clean. For tourists, it looks like a serene spiritual marathon. For locals who actually have to organize it, the pilgrimage often feels like a logistical nightmare managed by the most stubborn family member alive.
Enter Sakol, played with painful familiarity by Surachai Ningsanond. Sakol is a middle-aged businessman who discovers a psychic prediction claiming his elderly mother, Saluay, will pass away before her upcoming birthday. Instead of booking a second opinion with a cardiologist, Sakol decides to brute-force a miracle. He rounds up nine family members, rents a van, and lays out a militaristic schedule designed to cram an entire lifetime of spiritual brownie points into twelve blistering hours.
The comedy begins the moment the van doors slide open. Sakol is a control freak on a mission to game the karma system, treating the temples like loyalty stamps on a punch card. If the family can stamp the card nine times, grandma gets an automatic ticket to heaven and lives forever. Grandma Saluay, played with dry comic perfection by Amara Ramnarong, clearly hates the plan. She refuses to play along with the grand spiritual theater. When the van stops at the first few glittering monuments, everyone acts like she should be overwhelmed by divine gratitude. Instead, she sighs, rubs her aching knees, and wonders why she cannot just enjoy her retirement in peace.
Anyone who has ever ridden in a car with three generations of relatives knows what happens thirty minutes after leaving the driveway. The veneer of polite respect shatters instantly. Inside the passenger compartment, Sakol’s brother Pongpol whines about real estate deals they should have bought twenty years ago. Aunts argue about who has spent more money on household groceries. Tor, an agnostic grandson who visibly rolls his eyes every time the van turns into a gravel temple parking lot, openly debates whether the monks running the shrine gift shops are running a racket.
Sompot Chidgasornpongse spent years working as the chief assistant director to Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the master of dreamy, slow Thai cinema who brought the world Memoria and Tropical Malady. That background gave the filmmaker an uncanny ability to let ordinary human behavior breathe on screen. A lesser director would have turned this setup into a broad, noisy slapstick movie packed with screeching tires and slap-fight arguments. Chidgasornpongse does the exact opposite. He sets the camera down on a tripod and lets Jonathan Ricquebourg, the cinematographer behind the visually mouthwatering drama The Taste of Things, capture the scenes in gorgeous wide frames.
The resulting aesthetic makes the family squabbling ten times funnier. You stare at a centuries-old golden pagoda glowing beneath the tropical sun, framed like a museum painting. Then, drifting across the bottom of the frame, you hear relatives griping about who forgot to pack the cold towels, why the parking attendant wanted twenty baht, and whether Grandma needs to visit the bathroom for the fourth time in forty minutes. It captures the great paradox of modern religious tourism. We surround ourselves with ancient symbols of universal peace while obsessing over air conditioning and stomach gas.
Online film communities and festival blogs have spent months unpacking the political and philosophical metaphors baked into the trip. Tor represents the restless, skeptical youth of Thailand, exhausted by superstitions and institutional rituals. Sakol embodies the older, conservative generation that relies on traditional hierarchy, using religious devotion as an excuse to ignore the emotional reality of aging. When Tor begs his father to turn the car around and take their exhausted grandmother home, Sakol responds with genuine panic, treating the unfinished tour like skipping life-saving medicine. To Sakol, giving up means admitting that human beings cannot buy their way out of death.
The tension turns funny because it is so recognizable. Every family has an uncle who insists that following a rigid rule will solve a problem that nobody wants to talk about. Sakol is terrified of losing his mother, but admitting that grief out loud would require being emotionally vulnerable with his siblings. Buying saffron robes and thrusting incense sticks into sand urns gives him something to do with his anxious hands. He hides behind ritual because ritual feels like control.
Meanwhile, Grandma Saluay sits in the middle of this spiritual whirlwind like a stubborn rock in a rushing creek. She provides the grounded humor that keeps the movie from drifting off into pure academic navel-gazing. While the men fight over cosmic philosophy and the daughters bicker over who is the most attentive caregiver, Saluay just wants a comfortable chair and some quiet. She knows what her children are really doing. They are making merit for their own peace of mind, not hers. Dragging an elderly woman across asphalt courtyards in ninety-degree heat does not show devotion, it shows how far people will go to soothe their own guilt.
By the time the afternoon light turns orange, the family looks less like a troop of blessed pilgrims and more like survivors of a natural disaster. Clothes are damp with sweat, incense dust clings to everyone's sandals, and the grandmother looks completely done with the living world. The trip unravels in quiet, surprising ways as members wander off to meditate, check their phones, or talk to farm animals wandering near the temple grounds.
The film captures an honest portrait of love in all its annoying, bumbling glory. Sakol is frustrating, bossy, and self-deluded. His kids are cynical and lazy. Yet none of them are villains. They piled into that hot van because, despite all the eye-rolling and petty squabbling, they care about the woman sitting in the passenger seat. They have completely different ideas about God, karma, money, and duty, but they still shared the ride.
9 Temples to Heaven proves that the road to enlightenment is paved with broken air conditioning vents, forgotten temple passes, and awkward family car rides. You might not manage to cheat death with nine plastic offering buckets, but at the very least, you will end up with an unforgettable story to tell at the funeral.
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