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| Festival du Nouveau Cinema |
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| TRAILER |
The film opens in a pall of particulate haze: Nat (Davika Hoorne), a factory worker, dies of respiratory illness caused by dust pollution. Her husband, March (Witsarut Himmarat), remains suspended in the paralysis of grief, surrounded by a landscape coated in the gray residue of both industrial waste and memory. When Nat’s spirit inhabits a vacuum cleaner—one of the very tools used to erase traces of dust—the irony is merciless and exacting. It is as though the dead, denied justice, must return as instruments of cleaning, of servitude, of domestic invisibility. Yet in Boonbunchachoke’s careful hands, this absurdity turns sacred. The vacuum becomes not an object of satire but an avatar of reclamation, embodying a truth that love—when stripped of form, flesh, or reason—can still persist as a labor of care.
What the film undertakes, with almost ritualistic rigor, is shadow work—the confrontation of what society demands we repress. Each scene excavates another layer of denial: the mother-in-law’s disdain for the ghostly daughter-in-law, the factory owner’s insistence on safety compliance despite obvious hazards, the state’s bureaucratic efforts to “delete” memory through neurological erasure. Memory here is both burden and rebellion. When Nat’s family subjects March to a form of electrotherapy designed to erase his recollections, the act carries an unmistakable political resonance: the authoritarian desire to cleanse, to sterilize history, to vacuum away the dust of guilt.
Boonbunchachoke does not let us rest in metaphor; he insists that the allegory remain porous to reality. Thailand’s environmental crises, its history of political repression, and its cultural hierarchies of obedience are not subtexts but tectonic forces under the film’s surface. The possessed vacuum cleaner—half absurdist joke, half icon of domestic labor—becomes a vessel through which the ghosts of the working class speak. In this sense, A Useful Ghost transcends its narrative frame to become a political séance. Each hum of the machine, each wisp of dust inhaled, becomes testimony.
What astonishes most is the film’s capacity for vulnerability. A lesser director might have reduced this premise to ironic detachment or grotesque parody. Boonbunchachoke instead allows tenderness to become a form of subversion. The much-discussed love scene between March and the possessed vacuum, handled with extraordinary delicacy, becomes the film’s emotional fulcrum. It is both comic and tragic, erotic and mournful—a tableau of love’s refusal to yield to rational form. The act, framed not as fetish but as communion, reveals the film’s secret conviction: that vulnerability is a force, not a fracture.
In this world, emotional honesty is not luxury but necessity. Each character, even those trapped in denial, is forced to confront the debris of their own complicity. Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon), Nat’s mother-in-law, embodies the moral paralysis of generations who mistake silence for piety. Her hostility toward the ghost is tinged with shame, her attempts at exorcism echoing Thailand’s broader culture of repression. Yet Boonbunchachoke, ever compassionate, never ridicules her. He understands that the oppressor and the oppressed are bound in a circular geometry of fear. His film asks: What does it mean to be “useful” in a world that commodifies even the dead?
If A Useful Ghost achieves a paradigm shift, it lies in its redefinition of utility and presence. In a capitalist cosmology, usefulness is measured by productivity, by the ability to erase waste. Boonbunchachoke overturns this logic entirely. His ghost is useful precisely because she refuses to disappear—because she insists on the sanctity of persistence, of haunting as remembrance. The film’s structure mirrors this act of resistance: elliptical, recursive, never quite resolving into linear catharsis. Its architectonics are liberatory; they suggest that to rebuild a wounded world, one must first dwell in its ruins with unflinching gaze.
By its final act, the film widens its scope to the collective. Nat’s ghost becomes a mediator among other “appliance-spirits”—workers who died from factory neglect and whose souls now inhabit machines. Their alliance, initially an absurdist conceit, transforms into something profoundly political: a communal forge of the dispossessed. Through these spectral collectives, Boonbunchachoke articulates a theory of resistance rooted in compassion rather than vengeance. The ghosts collaborate not to destroy, but to restore equilibrium—to turn haunting into a form of solidarity.
This is the film’s quiet radicalism. It posits empathy as a regenerative force—an energy not of resignation, but of renewal. The cosmic calculus here is moral: every act of care, however futile, recalibrates the balance of the living and the dead. Boonbunchachoke’s storytelling carries the spiritual resonance of mystic realism: his belief in the synchronic flow between seen and unseen worlds recalls Andrei Tarkovsky’s conviction that cinema is a temporal prayer. The numinous emerges not from spectacle but from patience, from the simple persistence of love in polluted air.
The film’s aesthetic integrity reinforces its spiritual authority. Every frame bears disciplined realism—earnest, yet never sentimental. The editing by Chonlasit Upanigkit allows scenes to breathe, to ache, to stretch beyond narrative necessity. Even the score by Chaibovon Seelukwa—part elegy, part industrial hum—functions like a second heartbeat, mechanical yet humane. In its refusal to rush or reassure, A Useful Ghost earns its gravity.
And yet, beneath its tragic poise, the film possesses humor—a spectral comedy that reveals how absurdity and sorrow coexist in all acts of survival. When monks insult the vacuum cleaner, calling it profane, the scene flirts with farce before resolving into quiet outrage. It is this oscillation between laughter and mourning that gives the film its alchemical power. Like a ritual that blends mourning with play, it purifies without erasing.
Ultimately, Boonbunchachoke’s debut is not about ghosts but about the ethical responsibility of remembrance. In its haunting beauty lies a manifesto for emotional honesty: that to grieve truly is to change, and to change is to resurrect what we’ve buried. The film demands regeneration—of self, of society, of cinema itself.
“A Useful Ghost” lingers as an afterimage on the conscience. It does not end so much as it continues to hum within the viewer, like an unseen engine of empathy. In a cinematic landscape crowded with noise and novelty, Boonbunchachoke has crafted something enduring—a film that listens. It listens to the silence of the dead, to the murmur of dust, to the quiet insistence that even in decay, love remains a force of renewal.
Its haunting is not punitive but purgative. And in that compassionate aperture—between the absurd and the divine—A Useful Ghost becomes not only a film to watch, but one to remember, to inhale, and to live with.
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