A Useful Ghost reminds us that the ghost story and the horror movie can be different things entirely. Haunting doesn’t necessarily mean mayhem and death. This film in some respects takes us back to a time when films like I Married a Witch or The Halfway House provided mainstream entertainment of a spooky rather than frightening kind, though neither of those old glories contained scenes of men having anal sex in an empty warehouse. Nor did they feature a central character called Academic Ladyboy (Wisarut Homhuan), first of the hauntees in Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s debut.
In the film’s opening scenes Academic Ladyboy is buying a vacuum cleaner to deal with the dust in his apartment caused by the redevelopment of his part of town. In the morning he discovers that the dust is back on the floor. So he rings the company to complain and is surprised to find an engineer at his front door before he’s even put the phone down. Krong (Wanlop Rungkumjad) is a handsome young man and Academic Ladyboy is instantly interested. But before he can get down to flirting properly, the engineer has started telling him the story of a household appliance factory where a worker’s death led to its machines being haunted.
Is Academic Ladyboy’s vacuum cleaner possessed by an unquiet spirit? It may be. And Krong’s story – about the owner of the factory and her son’s relationship with the spirit of his dead wife, now also inside a household appliance – reveals that this is not a unique occurrence.
A Useful Ghost was meant to be Thailand’s entry for the Best International Feature Oscar but someone cocked up the admin and it was disqualified before the race was even started. But it won the Grand Prize at Critics Week at Cannes, so it clearly has its fans.
Boonbunchachoke’s story is absurd and surreal and faintly reminiscent of something by Quentin Dupieux, the French oddball who gave us Rubber, about a sentient truck tyre. Unlike Dupieux, Boonbunchachoke tries to get form to follow content. If style can be haunted, then this is a good example of it – characters stand around motionlesss, staring straight into the static camera. Compositions are unsettling, clearly “wrong” – like the scene in a doctor’s surgery where the doctor’s face is obscured by the plant on his desk. Boonbunchachoke also revives ancient ways of doing things – iris and swipe dissolves, frames with ragged edges, what looks like projector burn and very grainy grain, plus scratches on the film. Film-making from the crypt seems to be the idea.
Things take a darker turn when the family of the guy who’s having a relationship with the spirit of his wife decide to give him electroshock therapy to cure him of his delusion – March (Wisarut Himmarat) sees beautiful, young Nat (Davika Hoorne); March’s furious mother Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon) sees her son being pleasured by a vacuum cleaner. Boonbunchachoke pushes his initial absurd premise further and further, as if daring us to follow along. Buddhist monks calling Nat a “cunt”. An interlude where a vacuum cleaner enters the dreams of the workers at the factory. A fight between a fridge freezer and a vacuum cleaner. The two naked men having sex. On we are lured.
Ghosts as go-betweens, as the victims or perpetrators of deeds in the past, echoes of which affect the present – the film slides into this more thoughtful realm while never leaving the absurd entirely behind.
Boonbunchachoke has said in interview that his film is about Thailand’s 2014 coup d’état, air pollution and the state of the queer nation. Yes, yes and yes, sort of, though it’s the political aspect that seems to have come out on top by the time things have been wound to a satisfying close.
A strange, complex, funny but contemplative film, emblematic of a wider shift in film-making and a confirmation of the return of older and gentler tales of the supernatural.
A Useful Ghost – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2026
