A Useful Ghost

Ghosts, like dust, get everywhere in Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s impressively unpredictable feature debut, which spirited away the top prize in Cannes Critics' Week. They’re inside the machines in a literal sense but they also drift in and out of psychological spaces and express themselves as internal shadows. There’s ghosts of grief and ghosts of the national past all wrapped up in a spirited comedy. A film that rests on absurd humour but becomes increasingly poignant and satiric as it goes, it is not only ambitious – a term often used to damn films with faint praise – but successfully so, as the writer/director employs a story within a story device for his shaggy dog ghost tale.

Chief among the ghosts is Nat (Davika Hoorne). Once the wife of March (Wisarut Himmarat), her devout love for her husband means she’s not about to let a little thing like dying young get in the way of their relationship.

Her story is folded into a framing tale involving an unnamed young man (ApasirI Nitibhon), who describes himself as an “Academic Ladyboy”. He purchases a vacuum that starts to cough in the night. It’s repairman Krong (Wanlop Rungkumjad), who arrives suspiciously quickly, who comes armed with Nat’s tale, which unfolds in fits and starts across Boonbunchachoke’s multi-layered film.

Ghosts in Boonbunchachoke’s surreal story don’t just show up as apparitions but instead have a tendency to embed themselves in appliances. The Ladyboy hears how one, the spectre of a worker who blames his death on the factory where he worked and died, coughing on the production floor, has come to flit in and out of its machines. A factory inspector, unimpressed, tells the owner Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon), who is also March’s mother, that the place must shut until further notice.

All of which brings us to Nat, who takes up residence in a cheerful looking red vacuum cleaner with a plastic halo-shaped handle that glows with different colours according to her mood. March immediately recognises her and a good deal of humour stems from what he sees (the spirit of Nat) and what his family sees (a horny vacuum cleaner) plays out. With this unlikely pairing Boonbunchachoke craftily nods to the idea of queer relationships meeting with familial and societal resistance. Suman’s other son Mos (Katanyu Swangsri) is in a gay relationship with Aussie Ted (Dhyan Ho) but that, it turns out, has only recently become acceptable to the family for financial reasons. This is the first, but not last, indication of money buying power and corrupting as it goes.

The return of ghosts, we’re told, is “an act of protest” and one which they can only accomplish while they, and their loved one, remember. This idea of memory and forgetfulness are powerfully employed as Suman initially tries to use electric shock therapy to erase Nat from his mind. The “therapy” not only evokes the horrifying spectre of gay conversion techniques but myriad forms of forced authoritarian “re-education”. When Nat starts to prove to have her uses, a minister called Dr Paul (Gandhi Wasuvitchayagit), who has a considerably more all-encompassing ghost problem rooted in Thailand’s violent crackdown in 2010 protests, senses an opportunity which takes the film into more poignant and satirically pointed waters. Even “good” ghosts it seems may be corrupted by circumstance.

While the political subtext adds depth that doubtless proves increasingly rich for those with a knowledge of Thai history, the entertainment charms of Boonbunchachoke’s film and its consideration of universal themes of grief and power, should also not be underestimated. The production design is detailed throughout, from an indelible blood stain on the factory floor to the clinical hospitals and space age style of the room where the electrotherapy is dished out.

The costumes, too, carry both humour and weight. Nat, when we see her as a human rather than a hoover, in a sort of outsized cobalt blue power suit with a gauzy insert in the neckline, has an otherworldly quality, while Suman’s unpleasant relatives occasionally turn up as a disapproving chorus, united by costume colour. The physical effects, which feel practically “Sweded” in places, also have a humanistic charm – not least in a showdown between Nat’s vacuum self and another piece of white goods.

Boonbunchachoke has us laughing so hard that we hardly notice as the film starts to drift into more serious territory until the subtext starts to bite. This may be a punk spirited endeavour but beneath the exuberant silliness lies a bedrock of seriousness that haunts the humour and urges us not to forget.

Reviewed on: 17 May 2025