A Useful Ghost

A man wakes up in the middle of the night and hears his vacuum cleaner coughing. It’s the start of a highly original and witty cinematic experience with romantic, absurdist, and political undertones. After his wife’s death, March is inconsolable —until he hears a familiar voice during a visit to his mother’s factory. After her death, Nat is reincarnated as a ghost inside a vacuum cleaner and returns to her husband, March. What brings him comfort is unacceptable to his conservative family: they fear ghosts and want to banish her from their world. However, when Nat clears their factory of ghosts and saves the company, she is accepted as a “useful” ghost.

With this absurd premise, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke delivers an explosive debut: a fierce, multi-layered attack on the Thai establishment. Cloaked in Buddhist philosophy, he dissects the hypocrisy of civilian life, the cruelty of the religious elite, and the tyranny of the industrial upper class. What begins as a surreal love story unfolds into a sharp satire on grief, family ties, oppression, and collective memory, in which ghosts continue to haunt and a political past refuses to fade away.

At the same time, A USEFUL GHOST is a playful ode to storytelling itself, in which dreams, fantasies, and frame narratives blend together. The film explicitly embraces outsider perspectives and queerness, and makes space for bodies, identities, and desires that fall outside the norm—both living and dead.

“If Yorgos Lanthimos relocated to Thailand, his next film might look something like this,” wrote Variety. Not a gimmick, but a visually striking and inventive film that uses absurdism as a political tool. Awarded the Grand Prix at the Semaine de la Critique in Cannes, the film draws you into a ghost story that is as witty as it is unsettling.