Cinema has long served as a mirror to society, and at the Venice Film Festival this year, Thailand’s Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit offered its audience a sobering reflection. His new film, Human Resource, situates viewers in the life of a young, pregnant office worker in Bangkok, exposing the painful emotional toll of white-collar work. For those working in corporates, the film is more than a piece of art.
Thailand’s booming economy has produced a generation of white-collar employees. These are the people who’ve bled sweat and tears to fight rising inequality, precarious work, and creeping disillusionment. In Human Resource, this grim reality manifests as a surreal but all-too-believable dystopia. It manifests in the form of microplastic pollution, protective stab-vests marketed for office wear, and workers stunned into silence.
Isn’t the allegory beautiful and clear? We’ve seen workers and companies ignore psychological safety risk creating cultures where cynicism replaces creativity.
The film Human Resource, showcased at Venice 2025, paints a dark portrait of Thai corporate life. Beyond cinema, it raises urgent questions for HR leaders on burnout, workplace toxicity, and the future of employee wellbeing.(Image: Freepik)
Thailand’s corporate culture comes under the microscope
At the heart of the film is Fren, a character five weeks into pregnancy. She’s struggling to maintain emotional equilibrium while facing relentless corporate demands. Her doctor’s advice is far too simple, but complicated when you take practice into account. “Take care of your emotions,” sure lands hollow in a workplace where emotions are liabilities.
This storyline resonates with people across the globe working tirelessly to make ends meet. Across Asia and globally, employees are reporting record levels of burnout and stress.
Are there any lessons for us?
Human Resource may be bleak, but its themes provide urgent lessons for HR and workforce managers:
Set clear rules of productivity: Constant output at the cost of employee health is often unsustainable. How about we rethink productivity metrics to include wellbeing indicators?
It’s time to prioritize psychological safety: How about we accept that employees need more than an open-door policy? It could be in the form of structured mental health resources, anonymous reporting channels, and resilience programs that help mitigate toxic cultures.
Though grounded in Bangkok’s corporate life, the film’s message ends up resonating with people worldwide. In a globalized workforce, where hybrid work blurs boundaries and economic pressures intensify, the same sense of alienation and fatigue can be found in New York, London, or Mumbai. How about we create workplaces where human beings can thrive emotionally, psychologically and financially?
Human Resource is not comfortable viewing, nor is it meant to be! But its depiction of an exhausted, alienated workforce offers companies an opportunity to reflect on the cultures they are building. The film’s bleakness is the clarity companies need today.