Lost in the war-haunted jungles of Vietnam, four college students discover that some battles never really ended — and that the greatest danger may be carrying them.
Micro-budget horror is a genre that lives and dies on its ideas. Without the money to compensate with production value, all a filmmaker has is premise, atmosphere, and the nerve to follow through on both. M.I.A. A Greater Evil, the debut feature from Thailand-based production house 89 Dreams and director Abishek J. Bajaj, has ideas in abundance. Whether it quite knows what to do with all of them is another question — but the film earns genuine respect for trying.
Four American college students — Anita (Valerie Bentson), Steve (Lâm Vissay), Rachel (Sarah Ball) and the unstable Jez (Mark Matula) — set out into the jungles of Vietnam on a gold-hunting expedition. This is already a premise pitched at the maximally reckless end of the backpacker scale: a treasure hunt in a country whose forests are still, decades on, studded with unexploded ordnance and the memory of a war that was never cleanly resolved. The group's ambitions unravel quickly. A river detour they shouldn't have taken leaves them lost, stripped of their equipment, and very far from anything resembling rescue.
Then, that night, a stranger walks into their camp.
The most immediately striking thing about M.I.A. A Greater Evil is its cinematography. Ratchanon Kaeosaart shoots the jungle — filmed on location in Thailand — with real authority. The drone work establishing the vastness of the terrain is confident and well-composed, and the nighttime campfire sequences achieve a genuinely oppressive atmospheric density that many films with far larger budgets fail to find. One recurring shot — an extreme close-up of a forest creature on a mossy branch — functions as a quiet, effective transition device that shows a filmmaker thinking visually rather than merely efficiently.
The nighttime campfire sequences achieve a genuinely oppressive atmospheric density that many films with far larger budgets fail to find.
— Pass the Popcorn ReviewThe film's core concept is also legitimately interesting. The "burning question" it anchors itself to — what happened to the hundreds of American POWs unaccounted for after the Vietnam War — is exactly the kind of historically loaded premise that can elevate a genre piece from a thriller into something with actual weight. Screenwriter Peter Alan Lloyd weaves in ghostly Vietnam-era soldiers, a mystical "shepherd of souls" figure played with quiet intensity by Thai veteran Sahajak Boonthanakit, and a time-loop structure that takes some patience to decode but rewards it with a finale more emotionally resonant than the film's first act promises.
Valerie Bentson, in the lead role of Anita, is singled out in multiple audience reviews as the strongest screen presence in the cast — and fairly so. She grounds the film's more unhinged moments in something recognisably human, and her final scenes carry the weight the story needs them to carry.
Where M.I.A. A Greater Evil struggles is in cohesion. The film has several distinct and genuinely intriguing ideas — ghostly American veterans, a supernatural guide, a time loop, a family connection that surfaces late — and the problem is that they never quite coalesce into a single, unified vision. The Movie Waffler, in their review, put it precisely: the plot devices "don't coalesce," and viewers who come expecting clean genre mechanics are likely to feel that the film ends before it has fully assembled itself.
The dialogue can be stilted in places, and some of the supporting performances are uneven — a function of budget more than talent, likely. The pacing in the mid-section sags. And the film's central tension — that the group is in mortal danger — is undermined somewhat by the fact that the physical peril never quite feels as immediate as the film's score suggests it should.
The film has several genuinely intriguing ideas, and the problem is that they never quite coalesce into a single, unified vision. But the finale earns its mystical, surprisingly emotive conclusion.
— Pass the PopcornWhat saves it is the ending. "That Moment In," one of the few critics to engage seriously with the film, noted that M.I.A. A Greater Evil "works hard to get to its mystical and surprisingly emotive finale" — and this is accurate. The film's conclusion, once it arrives, is genuinely affecting in a way that feels earned rather than convenient. It recontextualises some of what came before in a way that rewards the patient viewer.
An Earnest and Atmospheric Debut
M.I.A. A Greater Evil is a film that is genuinely more interesting than its rating suggests. It is ambitious beyond its budget, anchored by a strong lead performance from Valerie Bentson, and bolstered by cinematography that punches well above its weight. The jungle sequences have real atmosphere. The finale lands. The problem is the middle — where the script's many ideas compete for space without finding a clear hierarchy — and a dialogue track that occasionally betrays the production's constraints.
This is the kind of micro-budget debut that makes you curious about what director Abishek J. Bajaj will do with more resources. 89 Dreams' production is earnest, visually credible, and built on a historical premise with genuine resonance. If you are patient with it, it rewards you.
M.I.A. A Greater Evil is available on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Tubi, and Plex. Runtime: 86 minutes. Rated TV-MA.