A Useful Ghost

The widower March is grieving for his wife Nat, who died of the effects of air pollution. But Nat comes back — not as a person, but as a ghost living inside a vacuum cleaner. Somewhere between farce and melancholy mourning, a touching and absurd love story unfolds between a man and a machine, to the horror of March’s family. At the same time the house is haunted by a second restless spirit: a dead factory worker whose death once forced the family business to close.

Thai cinema has a long tradition of the ghost film, barely known here. But Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s debut is not after the chill; it widens the genre to take in comedy and fantasy. The result is an amalgam of registers in which the outlandish idea of a haunted vacuum cleaner turns into a reflection on environmental destruction, labour and collective memory. Behind the burlesque lies a precise critique of a system that puts even the dead to economic use. “A Useful Ghost” tells all this playfully and seriously at once, queer and pulpy, less pantheistic than Apichatpong Weerasethakul but driven by the same question: how memory can be defended against forgetting. A radical film, awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes (Semaine de la Critique) — and one that establishes its director as a new and unignorable voice in South-East Asian cinema.

Shown at the 2025 edition of Around the World in 14 Films, Berlin.

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