The Judgement is a 13 episode 2018 TV series from Thailand, currently airing on Netflix. It's another Asian drama about the life of young school kids. Unfortunately, it has a lot of problems.
SPOILERS AHEAD!
Here's your basic story: Young college girl's dad gets in a car accident and is in a coma. This leaves her alone with her stepmom whom she doesn't get along with. In order to get some breathing room, she (Lookkaew) goes to a party where she gets drunk, passes out, and is raped by her boyfriend. Somebody filmed the incident and uploaded it to the internet and her school chat boards. So yeah, things aren't going too good for her. Following the assault, it's a matter of Lookkaew dealing with the aftermath and eventually healing and moving on.
There are several side stories as well that primarily entail other students dealing with their own problems of assault, shame, fitting in, bullying, sexual orientation, etc...some of these stories work well at times, but only rarely. Overall, I really like what they are trying to do here with the stories they are telling, but this show is vastly hindered by everyone working behind the scenes on this production.
Unfortunately, it is clear that the director and production crew working this show are either VERY inexperienced and/or VERY incompetent, and that is a huge problem. The budget here is small, and that's not uncommon for similar shows of this nature, but that's no excuse not to have somebody on set who knows where to place a boom mic. I can't believe I'm watching a show in 2018 that can't figure out how to properly record sound; incredibly, they seemed to have put microphones on shoes and in student's backpacks because I can hear every foot shuffle across a floor and every backpack whooshing up against a wall, but, a person speaking more than a meter away from the main conversation is barely audible. And that's not the only production related problem with this show.
I don't mean to be rude, but this entire effort frequently looks like it was put together by first year film students who've never been on a production set before. Aside from the inexplicable sound issues, this show is very poorly directed as a whole; scene pacing is frequently abysmal, there are numerous long pauses and lots of extraneous scenes and shots that serve no purpose, and the director provided little in the way of direction to the cast. Editing is equally terrible...forget sharp and snappy cuts, this show can't even get the basics of Editing 101 down, for example; when a scene is supposed to start/end by having a character enter/leave a room, it shouldn't look like someone is standing or wandering around waiting for the director to yell "action" or "cut"...not so here, as it often seems everything that was filmed makes it on screen.
As for the plot and writing; the overall story lines aren't bad at all, but the dialogue and screenwriting is a bit lacking for the bulk of this series. A second unit writing team would have certainly helped, but this department is the least of this show's problems.
Acting; I don't recall seeing any of these actors or actresses prior to this show, and I've seen numerous recent productions from Thailand. Some of the older actors portraying the parents and school officials are really bad (like "they need to find another profession asap" bad). The lead, numerous students, and the one crusader teacher, fair a little better, but they too are often lacking. It's hard to blame them for their performances though; they are young and inexperienced and need guidance and DIRECTION, but, they just aren't getting much of any of that here. I would like to see several of them given other opportunities in better productions before judging their acting abilities.
Summary: This series is not ready to compete on Netflix with recent similar shows like On Children & Girl From Nowhere. It wants to tell a meaningful timely story about teens/young adults, but just doesn't really know how to do it. The director and entire production team needs to up their game A LOT if and when they ever get another shot at this. In the meantime, their efforts on this particular show results in the rating it deserves.
Bottom Line: Alas, 5 out of 10 stars. Come on Thailand, I know you can do better than this!
