Netflix’s Thai prison drama In Youth We Trust offers a tragic look at the decrepit, dysfunctional penal system existing in almost every corner of the world, which propagates lawlessness by dehumanizing anyone who gets trapped in it. The movie follows the harrowing predicament of juvenile criminals in a correctional facility, a veritable hellhole with its own rules and regulations that traps its subjects in the cycle of violence and cruelty for the sake of survival, where empathy and mercy have no place. As the makers wanted to highlight the dire situation in the most grounded way possible, In Youth We Trust offers a spectacle that is agonizingly hopeless and bleak.

Spoilers Ahead

Why Did Puek End Up In The Correctional Facility?

In Youth We Trust begins with Sripuek, a teenager from a rough neighborhood in Thon Buri, who is being interrogated in the presence of a psychiatrist and a...