A Useful Ghost

The Dust Settles Where It Pleases

It sounds like a punchline you’d hear at 2 A.M. in a dive bar: a grieving widower's dead wife reincarnates as a vacuum cleaner. Yet Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s debut feature, *A Useful Ghost* (2025), takes this absurd premise and spins it into something unexpectedly moving and sneakily subversive. Winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes Critics' Week, it’s a film that operates on its own surreal wavelength. I am not entirely sure I have it all figured out, but I have not stopped thinking about it.



Boonbunchachoke does not start with the central romance. Instead, we open with a self-described "Academic Ladyboy" (Wisarut Homhuan) dealing with a severe dust pollution problem in Bangkok. He buys a high-end vacuum, only to discover it’s haunted, prompting a visit from a handsome repairman, Krong (Wanlop Rungkumjad). (The chemistry between these two is an immediate delight.) Krong begins recounting the history of haunted appliances, leading us into the story of March (Witsarut Himmarat) and his late wife Nat, played by Thai superstar Davika Hoorne. Nat died of dust poisoning from the family factory, only to return as a household appliance to protect her husband and son. The metaphor is not exactly subtle—dust as the pervasive, suffocating grip of an oppressive system, the literal byproduct of capitalist extraction and political decay. Thailand's recent history of protests and junta rule looms large over the narrative, turning the ghost story into a sly critique of how the working class is treated as disposable machinery.

What makes the film work is its absolute refusal to wink at the audience. It plays its ridiculousness completely straight. There is a deep, melancholic sorrow lingering right beneath the surface of the deadpan comedy. Apasiri Nitibhon, who plays March’s exasperated mother Suman, is the secret weapon here. Her face is a masterclass in suppressed frustration. Watch the stiffness in her shoulders, the slight clench of her jaw when she tells her son, "Please stop screwing your vacuum." It is delivered with the bureaucratic flatness of a bank teller denying a loan. She does not just want the ghost gone; she wants order restored.



Hoorne, widely known for her role in the massive Thai hit *Pee Mak*, has a much tougher job than you’d expect for someone playing opposite a Shop-Vac. She has to anchor the film’s emotional reality. When we see Nat in her human-ghost form, Hoorne's movements are stiff but strangely delicate, hovering somewhere between mechanical obligation and desperate human yearning. She captures the tragedy of a spirit who realizes that, even in death, she is only valued for her utility. The film poses a grim question. If you are no longer useful to the system, do you even exist?

There is a particular sequence where Nat, as the vacuum, attempts to clean the factory of vengeful spirits. It is both hilarious and desperately sad—a mother trying to scrub away the literal and figurative poison that killed her. As *Rolling Stone* noted, it is an "unclassifiable, truly wackadoo mix of comedy and supernatural shenanigans" that eventually morphs into a profound meditation on memory. The film explicitly links memory to defiance. Ghosts stick around because they remember, or because someone remembers them. To be forgotten—whether you are a queer factory worker or a casualty of corporate negligence—is the true final death.



Does every swing connect? Probably not. The pacing occasionally drags in the second hour, and the nested story structure sometimes stumbles over its own ambition. Whether that is a flaw or a feature comes down to your patience with meandering magic realism. Yet Boonbunchachoke has crafted something so fiercely original that the missteps hardly matter. *A Useful Ghost* is a strange, messy, profoundly human film that reminds us how easily we discard the past, and how fiercely it refuses to stay buried.