Bad Genius, directed by J.C. Lee, is an adaptation of the well-received Thai film by the same name. Based on a real SAT cheating scandal, the film turns the seemingly tedious act of bubbling in Scantrons into a riveting race against not just the clock, but also the test takers’ mental and moral limits. Despite its pithy title, the film finds nuance when exploring concepts of fairness and morality. The plot involves two high school tropes: the rich white jocks who can’t solve the quadratic equation to save their lives and the straight-A immigrant scholarship students whose families are in financial precarity. Each group has something the other desperately needs, but the stakes are not equal on both sides. This transactional relationship leads to several cheating heists, and along the way, there are moments of betrayal, tenderness, and anguish.
One of the scholarship students, Lynn Kang (played by Callina Liang), is very much a “classic” first generation child of working class Chinese immigrants. Pragmatic, responsible, and fiercely independent, she balances classes, homework, and extracurriculars, in addition to helping her single dad at the laundromat to keep the family financially afloat. Despite being an academic wiz and having the ability to solve math problems upside down, she dreams of pursuing her passion for piano, a passion nurtured from a young age by her late mother. Alas, her father, like many Asian parents, dismisses her dream, urging her to apply to MIT instead. In the meantime, her stellar academic record lands her a scholarship at a prestigious high school, but this spotless record is soon put at risk as she is confronted with tough decisions.
The film interrogates the concepts of fairness and ethics, posing hard questions and resisting the temptation to reach easy answers. Unlike in an exam, in real life, there are no correct answers to thorny dilemmas situated in a rigged system, and neither are there clear-cut heroes or villains. The cruel predicament of hardworking minority students like Lynn and Bank (played by Jabari Banks) is that they’re smart enough to see exactly how the cards are stacked against them. They’ve seen the price their families pay when playing by the rules, but they also fully see the risks of trying to game the system. At first glance, it looks like they are compromising their morals to help a bunch of rich kids cheat their way into college, but that would be too simple of an interpretation. Instead of focusing solely on the moral predicaments of the characters, the film forces us to confront the inherent unfairness of a world that puts teenagers in these ethical dilemmas in the first place.
The soundtrack, close-ups of the actors’ expressions, cuts to an interrogation room, and unexpected twists create just enough suspense to keep you at the edge of your seat until the very end. Beyond the high-stakes operation, the film also illuminates how unjust circumstances shake the characters to their emotional core. There’s the pain and grief Lynn experiences when faced with how her actions inadvertently create more suffering for others, the disappointment and anger that her dad feels when finding out about her actions, and the rage that Bank and Lynn experience when they feel like they have been used and betrayed. Injustice manifests not only in the existence of impersonal, dehumanizing systems, but also in the physical and emotional suffering people go through for a chance to pursue their dreams and to give their loved ones a better life. The writing is punchy and thought provoking, at times even scathing, and the actors’ restrained yet intense delivery portray the layers of emotion behind their words.
Towards the end of the film, there’s a line that rings tragically true: “It’s always the ones who have the most to lose who suffer.” The film lays bare the irony of how those who benefit the most from others playing by the rules are exempt from those same rules. However, the film is not completely nihilistic. There’s a wry hopefulness that this generation might be the one to do something about these issues; it just won’t be easy.
