NYAFF 2026: THE UNDERTAKER 2: WORLD AFTER DEATH

The 25th annual New York Asian Film Festival takes place from July 10th to July 26th. For details and showtime, click here.

Let us start here: I have not seen the first Undertaker film, but the ad copy assures me that it isn’t necessary to enjoy this follow-up, and i believe it; at no point did I find myself confused by the things happening onscreen. However, having seen the first one might have given me more of an idea of what the film actually was as opposed to the impression that the trailer gave… and the disconnect between the two did make it a bit tougher to enjoy this follow-up.

It is not necessarily the fault of the film itself that I went in with unmet expectations; I brought with me not just the expectations of the trailer, but also my previous experience with thai cinema: raucous, tonally schzophrenic, occasionally broad beyondall reason… and all the evidence pointed to a goofy supernatural romp. Which is… not what I got. In ways both interesting and aggravating.

The story opens with a truck clipping a man on a bike before plowing headlong into a tree. Driver and victim are reunited as Thoop(the driver, played by Phuwasit Ananbhornsiri) employs the services of Jerd (victim, Naruepol Yaiim) and his partner Siang (Chatchai Chinnasri), a pair of funeral officiants overseing the ceremony for Thoops’ wife, who died in the crash. Jerd and Siang find themselves roped into friendship with Thoop, whose overwhelming sense of grief and guilt have all but hollowed him out.

Meanwhile, an old lady gets struck by lightning.

Grandma Joy (Boonta Kutyapila), grandmother to expectant couple Lod (Natthawut Saenyabut) and Kaew (Thanwaporn Nasombat), is a cantankerous yet much loved elder in the small, nameless village where this story takes place. Stubbornly refusing to get to shelter during a lightning storm costs Joy her life… if only temporary. Not long after her funeral, Joy shows up, seemingly alive and well, and with tales of visiting the other side. These tales in turn make it back to Thoop, who channels all of his energy into a monomaniacal desire to learn the truth about death and what cmes after… with Jerd and Siang as his increasingly bewildered sidekicks.

From there the film follows parallel paths as Lod, Kaew, and Lod’s younger brother Meud (Thanadon Buarabat) try to make the best of their second chance with Grandma Joy, and Thoops’ quest to solve the mystery of death once and for all.

The Undertaker 2: World After Death is a movie with some fairly significant flaws, and we’ll get to those, but credit where credit is due: it is not a movie that lacks ambition or interesting ideas. But as the old saying goes, it is not what a movie is about but how it is about it, and that’s where the trouble starts.

First and foremost among the problems: length. At 128 minutes the film feels entirely too long.which is… curious, given the scale of the ideas the film wants to explore. But its goals feel at odds with writer-director Thiti Srinuans desire to make a hangout movie. There’s an aimlessness and a ponderousness to the proceedings so the sense of narrative momentum is constantly stalling out. Every other scene seems to go on one or two beats longer than necessary, and after a certain point we stop learning anything new about any of the characters. There’s a stasis there, and it gets harder to stay invested the longer it goes on.

The bifurcated plot line, while intersecting in extremely intersting narrative and thematic ways, also suffers from a certain imbalance. And here is where readers who know nothing beforehand might have the better of me: having watched the trailer, all evidence pointed to the primary plot being Thoop, Jerd and Siang running around to various experts on the afterlife, often with comic results. But many of those scenes don’t actually appear in the movie; instead, it fels like we spend the bulk of our screentime on the domestic antics of Grandma Joy and her family. And these parts, while occasionally amusing, too often fall back on the sentimental and the maudlin. It’s a problem that only gets worse when (spoiler alert) Joy’s resurrection turns out to have only been temporary and the focus shifts to young Meud, who takes this second passing especially hard.

But even as I complain about this… there’s something interesting there, as Meud can’t bring himself to say goodbye; after all, if she came back once, why wouldn’t she come back again? Why wouldn’t the impossible happen twice?

You could build an entire movie out of this one idea, but in execution here it boils down to many many scenes of Meud crying while sad painos tinkle mournfully in the background. A seed of something potent that in the end fails to sprout anything that you wouldn’t have seen on any random episode of Touched By An Angel.

The Thoop portion of the film, then, have a bit more juice, especially as he has the more surprising journey. It seems at first like the return of Grandma Joy has inspired Thoop to hope his wife might also return. But as more of his past is revealed and we become increasingly aware of the depth of his despair, the film gains a bit of tension from just how willing the movie will be to play out this very dark thread.

In this light, it does become a little easier to see why the more lighthearted scenes of spiritual investigation might have been snipped. But the unfortunate end result is a film that is less than the sum of its parts.

It’s hard to escape how negative this review sounds overall, and at the risk of repeating myself this is an extremely flawed movie. But it is in no way a bad movie, or an uninteresting one. To that end, let’s wrap up here by focusing on the stuff that works. For starters, when they go for the broader gags, their hit-to-miss ratio is pretty solid. There are a couple of sequences early on where Jerd and Siang oversee some unusual funerals that are a lot of fun, and while it may or may not be a gag, Lod’s mullet is a visual masterpiece. But perhaps more to the point as a cinemagoer: my constant refrain when it comes to the New York Asian Film Festival applies here, as ever; there is value in getting to see a completely foreign culture. There are rituals and customs here that I couldn’t make heads or tails out of, and that’s unquestionably a good thing; access to these things this make our worlds bigger, and that’s something of great value regardless of most other considerations.

On top of that, the sequences in which the various versions of the afterlife are explored are quite interesting, both visually and phenomenologically. And much of this is saved for the last 30 minutes of the film, which means that it ends fairly strong. So that’s to its credit as well.

While I can’t say I was fully on board with The Undertaker 2: World After Death, that doesn’t make it a movie not worth seeing for curious potential audience goers. There’s definitely something here, and it’s just enough to wish they knew where the real drama was.

Ah, well… maybe next life.