NR | 1h 28m | Drama | 2025
By their very nature, many parents have a habit of sacrificing for their children. Others are selfish and haven’t acquired this selflessness. They must learn this the hard way, sometimes from their own children.
One young man, Ethan Young (Andre Dae Kim), has a father who learns a lesson in selflessness.
Desperate to evade the control of his father, overbearing businessman Wayne Young (Russell Yuen), Ethan drops out of an elite prep boarding school and heads home to finish his senior year. Wayne has enrolled him, to his horror, in the under-resourced Robert Borden Public School, ostensibly to teach him obedience. Having prospered from humble beginnings, Wayne insists that Ethan ought to first earn, then inherit, his luxurious lifestyle and legacy.
To divorcé Wayne, it’s the rich who shape the world that the poor live in. He figures Ethan must learn the family business before evolving from rich kid to rich man. Ethan expects nothing but indifference from his stepmother, a starlet from Singapore.
He bides his time at Borden, reluctantly captaining its team in an interschool economics quiz competition. His mastery of math gives the team a shot at winning the $1 million prize—or so Ethan’s teacher Mr. Edwards (Alex Poch-Goldin) thinks.
Ethan hopes the prize money will help his less-privileged school and schoolmates Patrick (Connor Peterson), Rebecca (Jerni Stewart), and Sandy (Brynn Godenir). But things get complicated.
Wayne signs Ethan up for the Young Investors Club. There, Ethan is compelled to buddy up with snooty quiz rivals from elite school Bishop Academy, Kira (Aila Verheijke) and Charles (Brandon McEwan).
The film’s low-key support casting and occasionally caricaturish characterization denies it a much-needed level of sophistication. It doesn’t look and feel consistently spontaneous enough, and occasionally it feels more than a little staged.
Yuen and Kim do the heavy lifting, convincingly depicting a range of nuanced emotions. Ethan’s voiceover as narrator serves to reveal the rationale behind his actions and reactions. The narration also expresses some of the emotions he or Wayne doesn’t show—or aren’t allowed to show.
Life’s Multiplier Effect
Wayne assumes that, as Ethan’s father, he does what’s best for his son. But as Ethan’s story hints, that’s like assuming a math whiz is necessarily also an economics whiz merely because both involve finesse with figures.The trouble is that sharing parental knowledge and experience requires nuance. Wayne, used to being boss of his company, enforces his will on his son. Instead of taking Ethan into his confidence, he punishes the slightest hint of dissent.
Like most parents, Wayne wants only what’s best for Ethan. But unlike many selfless parents, he sees Ethan more as an extension of himself. Pitiably, Wayne ties his idea of self-worth to the trappings of his wealth, not to who he himself is. It’s why he wants his ambition and achievement to live on through Ethan, rather than selflessly preparing Ethan to better achieve success and to better cope with setbacks.
During the competition, a quizmaster asks expectant quizees to name the phenomenon in economics in which repeated aggregate demand spikes national income and economic output. Ethan has grasped this concept so well that he hits the buzzer before the question is completed and answers, “Multiplier effect!”
Writer-director Kacey Cox’s point is not just about getting right answers but also about life’s multiplier effect. He’s less concerned with the worth of goods and services than he is with self-worth.
Edwards demonstrates this idea when his underdog quiz team, faced with daunting odds, is about to give up. He brandishes a $20 bill, and then repeatedly asks them to name the “value” of the bill as he first folds, crushes, and soils it. His class, surprising themselves, confirm that it stays a $20 bill, regardless.
Cox’s screenplay explains that being born or brought up rich or poor is, and ought to be, ultimately immaterial.
Ethan takes Edwards’s words to heart. It’s as if he’s telling himself, his classmates, and his father: “You always have value. It’s valuing your self-worth and that of others that triggers a multiplier effect. Others, too, eventually respect your value and their own.”
