There’s a ghost in the machine – literally. Although Nat has died from a respiratory illness, her spirit has occupied a vacuum cleaner manufactured by her mother-in-law Suman’s company. Nat’s husband March is elated. Everyone else sees an appliance, but all he sees is his dead wife.
There’s more to A Useful Ghost than a simple, quirky haunting. In Thai director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s feature debut, a love that refuses to die doubles up as a metaphor for his country’s denial of its brutal past.
A Useful Ghost, which is out on Mubi, won the top award in the Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week section in 2025. The film is in the arthouse tradition, exploring its themes through a highly formal aesthetic that includes stillness, frontal compositions and deadpan humour.
The story of Nat (Davika Hoorne), March (Witsarut Himmarat) and March’s mother Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon) is told through a flashback. Reeling from dust generated by construction projects, a man buys a vacuum cleaner that turns out to be haunted. It isn’t the only one that has rolled out from Suman’s factory, the repairman Krong explains.
Spirits are floating among the workers, Nat being one of them. Nat has taken up home in a crimson vacuum cleaner that follows the grieving March wherever he goes, much to the shock of Suman and her extended clan. That is not how we use a vacuum cleaner, March is told when he gets intimate with the machine.
Priests are called. An exorcism is attempted. But Nat is stubborn, as is March. The marriage ended too soon for the young couple, and neither wants to let go.
Nat is benevolent too, unlike the ill-tempered poltergeist Tok who is spooking the vacuum cleaner company’s employees. The story behind why Nat hasn’t yet departed for the afterlife is linked to events in Thailand’s recent past.
Thailand’s well-established belief in spirits that co-exist with people has popped up in numerous films. A Useful Ghost follows this tradition, using Nat as a medium to talk about air pollution, homophobia, political repression and workplace safety. As a character says, the dead should not disturb the living, but what happens when the living disturb the dead?
The presence of ghosts causes consternation rather than fear, an irritation that the spirits are disturbing the cycle of life and death but also an understanding of the ourpose they serve. The 130-minute movie’s supernatural bent makes room for rational ideas.
Gorgeously filmed, with precisely framed, designed and edited scenes, A Useful Ghost takes a potentially gimmicky premise and turns it into a philosophical meditation on a love that not only defeats death and forgetting, but also leads to a reckoning.
