“RedLife” is a grimly immersive, relentlessly downbeat Thai melodrama that stumbles among the down-and-out crowd of Bangkok’s underbelly.

Sex workers and thieves dream small — starting a life as a couple, getting a “real job,” a single mom simply hoping her child finishes school, a daughter hoping for something “normal,” friendship and affection. That’s all they can allow themselves in lives this close to the margin.

It’s more interesting as a character portrait than a story with a coherent plot, more focused on putting us there than giving us insights into getting there and getting out. But it’s worth a look if you’re interested in that sex-work capital’s struggling masses yearning to breathe free, and make the rent.

Ter (Thiti Mahayotaruk) is the new guy in the gang, the one Kiang (Ukrit Willi Brod Don Gabriel) runs, attacking solitary victims, pitlessly beating them and stealing their wallets and backpacks.

They’re all around 20, but this new lookout is about as green as they get. He fails to intervene in a mugging that goes wrong, and ends up being the only one caught when the cops finally come. Only the intervention of his girlfriend, the sex worker Mind (Karnpicha Pongpanit) gets him out.

What she has to do to free him is just another reminder of how useless he is. He is frustrated, furious, cowardly and lost. He can’t even get himself out of this impoverished jam, much less dream up a better life for them both.

Som (Supitcha Sungkajinda) is a teen trying to keep a low profile at her girls school. She is months behind on her tuition and too broke to do anything extra-curricular. Her mother Aoi (Krongthong Rachatawan) won’t face these problems head on, as she’s deep in denial about her own financial affairs. Aoi still treats her teen as a child, another form of avoiding reality.

Aoi is a cranky 50ish sex-worker, staring at the end of the only means of making a bad living she ever had. As Som can’t talk with her about anything, the girl confides instead in a sympathetic 50ish drag queen.

Writer-director Ekalak Klunson and his co-writers don’t do much to tie these stories together even as we suspect they’re on a collision course. This tediously slow narrative merely reveals how unprepared for the “real world” that they live in Som and Ter turn out to be.

She falls in with the pretty, cocky Peach (Sumitra Duangkaew) whom she interrupts doing a little cutting in the restroom at school. Peach lives rich and large, talks big and lets Som glimpse a world she has never visited, and makes her ashamed to admit where she lives or what her mother does to keep them fed.

Ter rages at his girlfriend’s clients, his fellow gang punks and his lot in life. Impulsive and more violent than he seems, he never grasps how impotent his rage comes off even if we never forget it.

Any hope of possible salvation is ephermeral and fleeting, any redirection from the downward spiral of these lives feels temporary.

One can appreciate the degree of difficulty in making a movie this down and out and getting performances out of your leads that resonate. But as melodramatic complications pile up and the windows of hope close, you can’t help but wonder who the audience for this relentless and slow-moving bummer might be.

The meandering script wastes time on blind alleys and characters of limited purpose (the drag queen). By the time the credits rolled, I was ready to binge on sitcoms just to get this depressing, generally aimless exercise in hopelessness off the palate.

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, cutting, sex, some nudity, profanity

Cast: Thiti Mahayotaruk, Supitcha Sungkajinda, Karnpicha Pongpanit, Sumitra Duangkaew,
Ukrit Willi Brod Don Gabriel and Krongthong Rachatawan

Credits: Directed by Ekalak Klunson, scripted by Ekalak Klunson, Aummaraporn Phandintong and Jiraporn Saelee. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:01