Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke's debut feature 'A Useful Ghost' is a stylish and exhilaratingly confident film that won the Critics' Week grand prize at Cannes last year. The supernatural black-comic fantasy explores national grief with passion and panache, focusing on ghosts that refuse their afterlife confinement after Thailand's successive catastrophes: the 2010 military crackdown, coups in 2006 and 2014, and the 1976 Thammasat University demonstrations.
A Haunted Vacuum Cleaner and a Queer Academic
The film follows a queer academic (Wisarut Homhuan) writing a paper on the iconography of a frieze from Bangkok's Democracy Monument. He is astonished when his new vacuum cleaner starts coughing up the dust it has only just inhaled. Repairman Krong (Wanlop Rungkumjad), who arrives with eerie speed after a phone call to customer services, tells him the factory that made the hoover is haunted. A flashback reveals the strange story of a worker called Tok (Krittin Thongmai), who haunted the factory as a poltergeist after collapsing from ingesting poisonous dust.
Ghosts and Political Repression
The bad karma extends to the factory owner's family. Nat (Davika Hoorne), the young daughter-in-law of the owner's widow Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon), died in childbirth due to dust inhalation. She returns to invade one of the factory's vacuum cleaners, which comes to life and tries to have sex with her grieving husband March (Wisarut Himmarat). But Nat's ghost is prevailed upon by Suman and government minister Dr Paul (Gandhi Wasuvitchayagit) to make herself useful to the state by invading the dreams of workers who keep commercially and politically inconvenient ghosts alive by remembering them.
Suman must get these undesirables forgotten again – she is the ghost in the machine of repression, a ghost that the machine itself tries to turn against all other ghosts. There is something deeply troubling in the way Nat's ghost can be 'turned' by exploiting her yearning to have a baby, even in her own ectoplasmic state. Without the written permission that would otherwise be necessary, her widower is told he can use the eggs she had frozen for this purpose, and Nat's ghost is presented with a macabre 'death day' gift at the minister's luxurious modernist home.
Stylistic Flair and Emotional Depth
'A Useful Ghost' is heartfelt and elegant in its compositional flair, with dreamlike tableaux crisply juxtaposed in the edit. The whole effect is disquieting, erotic and terribly sad. It offers a humorous twist on the serious spiritual realities laid out in the movies of Thai master Joe Weerasethakul, such as 'Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives' and 'Cemetery of Splendour'. Western films like 'Ghost' and 'Truly, Madly, Deeply' also echo in its spectral shimmer.
The film envisions a Thailand vigorously effacing and pulverising its inconvenient past, roughly removing a frieze from the Democracy Monument, creating clouds of metaphorical toxic dust. It is a movie with flesh-and-blood intensity. 'A Useful Ghost' is available on Mubi from 24 July.
