Dust, haunted technology, and political trauma mark this uncanny deadpan Thai comedy where the corporeal and supernatural coexist with grounded preposterousness, as a dead wife returns as a possessed vacuum cleaner to protect her misunderstood husband.
Review #3,080
Dir. Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke
2025 | Thailand | Drama, Fantasy, Comedy | 130min | 1.66:1 | Thai, English & Lao
R21 (passed clean) for sexual scenes and some homosexual content
Cast: Davika Hoorne, Witsarut Himmarat, Apasiri Nitibhon, Wanlop Rungkumjad, Wisarut Homhuan
Plot: Worried about her husband being allergic to dust, Nat, a recently deceased woman, returns as a ghost possessing a vacuum cleaner to clean the house and protect her family from other vengeful ghosts in the house. To become a useful ghost, she needs to get rid of the useless ones.
Awards: Won Critics’ Week Grand Prize & Nom. for Camera d’Or & Queer Palm (Cannes)
International Sales: Best Friend Forever
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Supernatural Possession; Political Trauma; Family in Crisis
Narrative Style: Slightly Complex
Pace: Slightly Slow
Audience Type: Slightly Arthouse
Viewed: Screener
Spoilers: No
Dust is everywhere, especially from the constant construction work in any developing (or developed) city. It’s the same in Singapore as it is in Bangkok. Dust also has a sinister connotation—it’s no different from the ashes of the dead, scattered in the wind.
In A Useful Ghost, dust, as life and death, or as narrative incitement and consequence, becomes a critical device for first-time feature filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke in drawing an uncanny world where the corporeal and supernatural occupy the same reality.
This is not entirely surprising, and particularly in Thai art cinema, where ghosts aren’t an endangered species, nor are they frivolously or pretentiously leveraged.
One might argue that Boonbunchachoke’s work further expands how spectrality could be portrayed creatively—the concept is intriguing: a dead wife returns as a spirit possessing a vacuum cleaner so that she can be with her living husband, who’s misunderstood and allergic to dust. (Would have sounded absurd in any script lab, but it works.)
Not everyone’s happy about these pesky spirits, but the dead wife intends to protect her sad husband—and as part of further plotting, to get rid of useless, malignant ghosts that haunt other friends and families.
“It’s not possible to have development without dust.”
Tonally, there’s nothing in A Useful Ghost to suggest that it is a horror film, so don’t worry about being frightened to death. It operates more like a deadpan comedy, even as it opens up in the latter half to somewhat serious discourse on the politics of violence, which culminates in a bonkers final section.
But unlike, say, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s more spiritual Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), A Useful Ghost pokes fun at how memories and trauma are often made to be forgotten rather than ‘recalled’.
In today’s age of rapid AI development, one could also read the ghostly possession of technology as a form of sentient AI—but whether it is eventually malicious or ‘useful’ to humans, the jury is still out.
A kind of Roy Andersson meets Yorgos Lanthimos in Asian dressing, A Useful Ghost should fascinate most cinephiles looking for something that might be described as ‘grounded preposterousness’. If only the pacing were a notch tighter, it would have impressed further.
Grade: B+
Trailer:
Eternality Tan 