Thai Cave Rescue

Netflix ★★★☆☆

This six-part series doesn’t have it easy. How do you make the 18day Tham Luang Nang Non ordeal captivating when the story of a dozen adolescent to teen soccer players and their coach trapped deep inside the flooded cave system in 2018 has been told over and over?

The drama series, created by Michael Russell Gunn and Dana Ledoux Miller, is not quite as elegant and gripping as Ron Howard’s movie, Thirteen Lives, but is the more exhaustive, melodramatic and occasionally heavy-handed telling. It has one crucial ingredient the movies don’t: it’s told from the soccer team’s perspective.

We get to know the players, their families and the emotional baggage they carried with them deep into that cave. And the story is told with a sensitivity to local nuances thanks to Thai director Baz Poonpiriya and American-Thai film-maker Kevin Tancharoen, both executive producing alongside Jon M Chu (the Taiwanese American director behind Crazy Rich Asians).

The earlier episodes are pretty rough, especially when the writers desperately seek levity in a story that doesn’t often leave breathing room. There’s more confidence in later episodes. Veteran singer turned actor Thaneth Warakulnukroh is the standout among the cast. He finds reserves of empathy and grace notes in his performance as Governor Narongsak, the man tasked with overseeing the rescue.

Just make sure you watch it in the native Thai audio track with subtitles instead of the awkward English dub that the Netflix platform automatically reverts to. Radheyan Simonpillai