Rich, complex films that can be crassly oversimplified because of a sex scene between a human and a machine have had a great run at Cannes in recent years. Now, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s directorial debut “A Useful Ghost” is ready to join the canon of one of the nichest arthouse subgenres of the 2020s.
Much like “Titane” before it, the early discourse around “A Useful Ghost” might revolve around an intimate love scene between a Thai man and a Shop-Vac that’s possessed by the ghost of his late wife. (I’ll spare everyone the details, but I imagine the logistics will be easy for many of you to visualize.) But like Julia Ducournau, Boonbunchachoke has made a darkly hilarious film that deserves to be remembered for much more than its shock value.
“A Useful Ghost” begins with a real contender for the best opening line of this year’s festival: “Mere particles of dust in the air changed my ladyboy life forever.” It’s a fittingly funny launch to a film that revolves around the physical and spiritual dangers of dust particles. March (Witsarut Himmarat) runs a successful vacuum cleaner factory in Thailand. It’s a largely uneventful life, save for the occasional encounters with ghosts that haunt his place of business. But everything changes when his beautiful, loving wife Nat (Davika Hoorne) dies after being poisoned by dust in his factory.
The backbone of March’s young family and an incredible mother to their son Dot, Nat is gone but not forgotten. And she’s not even gone for that long. She soon returns as a ghost and assumes the body of one of March’s vacuums. The husband and wife resume their emotional and carnal relationship, but it’s clear she came back for a very specific reason: to clean the factory and prevent her child from being exposed to the particles that killed her. But her arrival poses a major emotional roadblock to March’s traditional family, who are jaded from a bad experience when a dead employee returned as a vacuum and threw a metaphorical wrench into their business. Plus, they’ve barely been able to wrap their minds around the fact that his older brother is gay. Welcoming a human-vacuum relationship into the family is a tougher proposition.
“A Useful Ghost” masterfully blends deadpan lines like “I’m less worried about the fever than the fact that he made out with a vacuum cleaner” with a sincere story about the invisible workers we choose to ignore and love that doesn’t waver in the face of family disapproval. The hardest challenge for films with such unique premises that have genuine heart behind them is often creating an internal set of rules that’s plausible enough to generate immediate buy-in from audiences. Transcending novelty is only possible when you convince us to stop saying “wow, that’s so weird” and begin genuinely investing in the characters.
Boonbunchachoke does an immaculate job of threading that needle by quickly establishing the way appliances who can recall their past lives are treated in this world. Being reincarnated as a vacuum cleaner is a rare, but not shocking occurrence in this family’s life. And given that they’ve already faced one major business setback caused by a sentient vacuum, any feelings of curiosity that you or I might experience in such a situation are immediately replaced with annoyance at the inconvenience. It’s their apathy towards the fantastical situation that allows their humanity to take center stage.
The magical realism is also cleverly woven into the ways of thinking that dominate traditional Eastern culture. The love for March that brings a reincarnated Nan back to the factory and the genuine happiness (not to mention sexual satisfaction) that she still brings him are an afterthought to a family that is primarily focused on selfless duty and sacrifice in the pursuit of maintaining the family image. That bittersweet tension between love and tradition provides the film’s emotional core as well as its very title, as Nan tries to endear herself to her former in-laws and differentiate herself from other ghosts by providing a sense of utility. As the family hesitates to accept her even with her mission to make the factory safer, the sincerity of everyone’s principles faces a genuine test.
Due to both its status as one of the highest profile Thai films to debut at Cannes in years and its unconventional reincarnation story, “A Useful Ghost” is bound to elicit some comparisons to the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It’s far from a perfect analogy, as “A Useful Ghost” moves at a pace that’s damn near brisk when compared to Weerasethakul’s meditative works. But hopefully Boonbunchachoke and the film community at large can look past the specifics and appreciate the invocation for what it really means: a phenomenal new filmmaker has arrived from Thailand, and international festivalgoers should expect to enjoy his works for years to come.
Grade: B+
“A Useful Ghost” premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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