My Best Worst Adventure is a 2020 family film about a testy American teen sent to stay with her eccentric Thai grandmother.
Teenager Jenny (Lily Patra) is in for a world of change when her stepfather sends her to rural Thailand and the care of her never-met-before grandmother. It’s a massive shift from the wealthy urban home life of the United States, living in a hut with geckos crawling on the ceiling and an old woman who eats bugs. In school, she meets a cute boy named Archit (Chinnaphat Kitichaivaranggoon), who isn’t what he seems, ending up more drawn to fellow schoolmate Boonrod (Pan Rugtawatr), a poor mute with a farm animal as his best friend. Boonrod is often bullied and attacked by the likes of Archit, so Jenny decides the best way to come out on top is to win the local buffalo race … and maybe along the way find their voice.
Written and directed by Joel Soisson, My Best Worst Adventure is a quaint family film that centers on the troubled Jenny, a Thai teen still reeling from the death of her mother, escaping into silence and refusing to speak, especially to her stepfather. She journals her life, including a diary and images in her iPad, finding adapting to the countryside of Thailand not so easy. She’s a good girl but wrapped in anger and frustration, seeing in Boonrod a companion in more ways than one.
While it’s a somewhat typical coming-of-age tale wrapped in the backdrop of farming Thailand (the film is mostly spoken in Thai), My Best Worst Adventure is also a thoughtful story of overcoming grief with a modest sprinkle of go-get-em girl power. There’s little parents won’t see coming, but perhaps plenty for its intended audience to discover, and since the two leads don’t talk, not too hard to follow no matter which language you’re comfortable with (there’s hardly any dialogue anyway).
If you’ve never seen or even heard of buffalo racing, well then, this will be a sight, as the last act puts a lot of weight into this as Jenny encourages Boonrod to enter his beast of burden in the contest. Along the way, we see the hard life Boonrod lives and the awakening Jenny undergoes while facing off against Archit and his powerful family. It’s perhaps not all that unfamiliar as storytelling landmarks go, and the reveals aren’t all that surprising, but it’s all done with great earnest and a slew of honest performances, especially the young Patra, who keeps the heart of this always in the right place.
Purposefully toned down and free of any too dramatic consequences, My Best Worst Adventure is a solid recommendation for family film night with easy to identify “villains” and “heroes’ clearly in the right. Warm and with touches of humor, this is a universal story made by people who understand their audience and the message they want to deliver. More so, while this is Patra’s film debut, I suspect we’ll be seeing her again plenty soon enough.