Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke's debut feature A Useful Ghost, winner of the Critics' Week Grand Prize at Cannes in 2024, is a stylish and exhilaratingly confident supernatural black comedy about national grief and political repression. The film envisions a Thailand that is vigorously effacing its inconvenient past, using a haunted vacuum cleaner as a central metaphor.
Plot and Themes
The story follows a queer academic (Wisarut Homhuan) writing a paper on the iconography of a frieze removed from Bangkok's Democracy Monument. When his new vacuum cleaner starts expelling dust it has just inhaled, repairman Krong (Wanlop Rungkumjad) explains that the factory that made it is haunted. Flashbacks reveal the story of worker Tok (Krittin Thongmai), who died after inhaling poisonous dust and became a poltergeist. The bad karma extends to the factory owner's family: Nat (Davika Hoorne), the young daughter-in-law who died in childbirth due to dust inhalation, returns to inhabit a vacuum cleaner and attempts to have sex with her grieving husband March (Wisarut Himmarat). However, Nat's ghost is co-opted by the factory owner's widow Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon) and government minister Dr Paul (Gandhi Wasuvitchayagit) to invade the dreams of workers who keep politically inconvenient ghosts alive through memory.
Style and Influences
The film is heartfelt and elegant in its compositional flair, with dreamlike tableaux crisply juxtaposed. The overall effect is disquieting, erotic, and terribly sad. It offers a humorous twist on the serious spiritual realities explored in the movies of Thai master Joe Weerasethakul, such as Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Cemetery of Splendour. Western films like Ghost and Truly, Madly, Deeply also echo in its spectral shimmer.
Political Commentary
The film references Thailand's successive catastrophes: the 2010 military crackdown, the 2006 and 2014 coups, and the 1976 Thammasat University demonstrations. According to the review, Boonbunchachoke envisions a Thailand that is vigorously effacing and pulverising its inconvenient past. The ghost in the machine of repression is embodied by Suman, who must make undesirables forgotten again, exploiting Nat's yearning to have a baby even in her ectoplasmic state. Without written permission, her widower is told he can use her frozen eggs, and Nat's ghost receives a macabre "death day" gift at the minister's modernist home.
Release and Availability
A Useful Ghost is available on Mubi from 24 July. The film is a flesh-and-blood intensity meditation on memory, grief, and political manipulation, delivered with passion and panache.
