Girl from Nowhere Season 2 Review 2021
Stars: Chicha Amatayakul, Tris Ren, Naomi Amante
There’s never a bad time for a revenger thriller, and a great one just landed on Netflix. After three years, the second season of Girl from Nowhere has arrived. And if you thought this Thai drama was deranged before, just wait.
Each hourlong episode revolves around Nanno (Chicha Amatayakul), the titular girl from nowhere. The best way to describe Nanno is an agent of chaos who deeply despises hypocrisy. Every episode, Nanno transfers to another school where she finds a different community full of people professing to be good, while hiding their own dark secrets. And every transfer she makes it her mission to expose this fraud in the most public and devastating way possible. That means revealing that a beloved teacher is a pedophile, faking her own death to scare a group of partying students who drugged her, and torturing a boy who flirts with the idea of cheating on his girlfriend. No matter what happens, Nanno’s revenge is always extreme, always interesting, and only somewhat feels deserved.
It’s that last detail that makes Girl from Nowhere so much fun. The adults and students Nanno targets are typically self-absorbed jerks. But they only deserve the truly severe torture she thrusts upon them about 75 percent of the time. Also, Nanno is never much better than the monsters she targets. She seems to love her own form of psychological torture more than she loves her odd take on revenge. The resulting narrative is a bit like watching Saw mostly through Jigsaw’s eyes, only in this case Jigsaw isn’t a creepy clown puppet but a small teenager with a deceptively sweet smile. Yes, these people are bad. But is the person who’s causing their nightmares any better?
Half the fun of the drama comes from guessing what Nanno is going to do next, but the other half completely derives from trying to figure out who this woman is. Is she a force of good? Is she pure evil? Is she a god? Does she have magical powers? Is she the gatekeeper to hell, and we’re just watching these men and women live out their personal torments? All theories are plausible.
That’s especially true of Season 2. Between impregnating a misogynistic playboy (yes, you read that right) and luring an old-school traditional teacher into a romance with another woman, Nanno also has to deal with a mysterious stranger who seems to understand her twisted game. Rather than act afraid or even annoyed by this new element, Nanno embraces it with her twisted smile. Fitting for this demon child, a game of cat and mouse is exactly what she wants.
As far as anthology thrillers go, Girl from Nowhere isn’t quite as much of a gut punch as something like Black Mirror. It also never takes itself too seriously. Girl from Nowhere tells the story of one twisted angel of discord and revels in the panic she routinely causes. It’s very weird. But there’s a lot of fun to be had in this insane show.
