Woranuch is an actress whose career has not taken off, and the part she ends up working hardest at is one her audience must never recognise as a part. In Overacting, a Thai action-comedy film made for Netflix, her father Winai, a retired top police officer played by the comedian Teng Therdtherng, starts slipping back into memories of his years on the force and of the criminal he never caught. To keep him from going after that old nemesis for real, Woranuch, played by Bow Maylada Susri, and her friends do what a group of out-of-work performers can do: they stage missions for him, choreographed police operations with no crime at the centre. Prueksa Amaruji, the director of the Netflix heist comedy The Lost Lotteries, wrote and directed it.

Netflix describes the film as a warm family comedy “infused with intentionally exaggerated, over-the-top action”, and the exaggeration is the premise, not a side effect. The Thai title, แก๊งโอเวอร์, translates roughly as “Gang Over”, and it puts the weight on the group rather than on the father: a company of performers putting on a show. The English title names the method. Somebody in this story has to overact on purpose, every time, for a spectator who spent a career reading real suspects.

A play with an audience of one

Read as a piece of dramaturgy, the setup is a play inside a film. There is a director, the daughter, who has to write the scenarios. There is a troupe, her friends, who have to learn their blocking and their cues. And there is an audience of one, Winai, who is also cast as the lead and does not know there is a stage. In classic farce the deception is usually built to fool someone with power over the plotters. Here it is built to protect the person being fooled, which changes what failure means. If a scene collapses in a farce, the liars get caught. If a scene collapses here, the premise suggests, a father learns that the case he thinks he is working is not real.

That gives the title a second edge. Overacting is the cardinal sin of the screen actor, the thing directors spend rehearsals scrubbing out. In this story it becomes a requirement, because the policing Winai remembers is, by the sound of the synopsis, the glory-days version: the top cop and the arch-rival who always got away. A realistic performance would not convince him. An action-movie performance might. The closest European cousin is Good Bye, Lenin!, in which a son rebuilds a vanished East Germany inside a flat to shield his mother. Overacting, going by its premise, trades the flat for a family’s own streets and the doctored news bulletin for a staged police mission.

Teng Therdtherng on the other side of the curtain

The casting carries much of the argument before a single scene plays. Teng Therdtherng, born Pongsak Pongsuwan in Sukhothai province, built his name as a comic in Thai nightclubs and on television, notably alongside Nong Cha Cha Cha on the variety series Ching Roi Ching Lan. His first feature was Killer Tattoo, the 2001 action-comedy in which he played an amnesiac hitman who had become an Elvis impersonator: a man who lost his past and kept performing. The Holy Man, in which he played a street hood who becomes a Buddhist monk, took 141 million baht at the Thai box office. In Nong Teng Nakleng-pukaotong he played a likay performer in 1923 Siam who stands to lose his theatre to the arrival of the cinema.

Overacting moves him to the other side of the curtain. After decades of being the one who performs, he plays the one who is performed for, the spectator who must believe. What’s on Netflix reports that it is his first Netflix project. How he plays a man who half lives in an old script is the open question the trailer can only hint at.

The troupe

Bow Maylada Susri, who led the My Boo films, plays Woranuch, the daughter who turns director. Kong Huayrai, a luk thung singer whose legal name is Akkhardet Yodchampa, is listed by TMDB as Toy; he arrives from a third stage tradition, the country-song circuit, and Overacting is also his first Netflix project. Joke Gornpop Janjaroen plays a character named Sua Hao. The wider ensemble lists Krist-kul Chumkaew, Theerawiwat Butrtaya, Lattapon Rujirojjindakul, Suppachai Hanumas and Prakasit Bosuwan. Netflix has not said who plays the elusive nemesis, or whether that nemesis is ever more than a memory.

Prueksa Amaruji and the pretence held up for family

Prueksa Amaruji, credited as Tui, is one of the directors Netflix leaned on when it started commissioning Thai films. The Lost Lotteries, his heist comedy about down-on-their-luck strangers who band together to recover winning tickets from a mafia gang based in a firecracker factory, was the first title of Netflix’s first Thai slate. Before that he made Bikeman and its sequel, comedies about a motorcycle-taxi driver who pretends to be a banker for his family’s sake when he runs into his childhood crush.

The thread is hard to miss. Prueksa’s comedies keep returning to ordinary people keeping up a performance for the people closest to them, and to the strain of holding the act together. Overacting pushes that idea to its limit: the whole family is now in on the pretence except the one person it is for. He shares the screenplay credit with Jarinee Thanomyat and producer Rerkchai Paungpetch, and the film comes from Raruek Production.

Growing old at home, in Thailand and on Netflix

Under the stunts sits a situation many Thai families know. Roughly one in five Thais is now 60 or older, and care for ageing parents is still largely organised inside the family. Netflix’s description speaks of a father who “slips into memories of his days as a police officer”, not of a diagnosis, and the film’s promotional material does not name an illness. What the premise does name is familiar enough: a retired man whose sense of himself is still bound to the job, and adult children improvising, day by day, how to keep him safe without taking that self away from him.

The platform has a reason to bet on that recognition. Netflix says more than 90 percent of its members in Thailand watched local content last year and that 33 Thai titles have reached its Global Top 10. Overacting is one of four films in its 2026 Thai slate, alongside three series and the company’s first Thai documentary feature, and it leans on comedy stars whose fame was made on stages and in living rooms rather than on streaming.

Every staged production has a closing night, and this one is written so that it cannot announce its own. The troupe can rehearse the next mission, and the next. What the premise leaves unresolved is who gets to decide when the show stops: the daughter who directs it, the father who believes it, or the old enemy who may still be out there.

Overacting: release date, cast and where to watch

Overacting premieres worldwide on Netflix on 5 November 2026. It is a Thai-language action-comedy feature listed by TMDB at 116 minutes; its Thai title is แก๊งโอเวอร์. Netflix released an official teaser in February 2026, followed by the official trailer from Netflix Thailand.

Bow Maylada Susri as Woranuch in Overacting. Photo: Supapat Supapunpinyo / Netflix © 2026

The film is directed by Prueksa Amaruji, who co-wrote it with Jarinee Thanomyat and Rerkchai Paungpetch. The cast is led by Teng Therdtherng as Winai, Bow Maylada Susri as Woranuch, Kong Huayrai as Toy and Joke Gornpop Janjaroen as Sua Hao.

Is Overacting a true story? Netflix presents it as an original comedy, and no book, play or real case has been announced as its source. It is a standalone film, not a series, and it is available only on Netflix.