Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s debut feature, A Useful Ghost, is a superb, part political reflection, part gentle love story, and part quirky ghost tale, all set in glowing fog and the remains of an industrial past. Playful and bold, the film moves through themes of death, memory, and class with ease, guided by a director who clearly understands how Thailand’s history and imagination continue to shape its present.
The story starts with a strange twist: March is mourning the death of his wife, Nat, who died from dust pollution, when he finds out her ghost has come back – inside a vacuum cleaner. From this unusual idea grows a touching story about grief and what it means to love in a world that has no place for ghosts.
Dust – real and symbolic – is at the heart of the film. In Thai slang, it refers to people pushed aside and made invisible by those in power. Like ghosts, they are treated as disruptions: inconvenient, unwelcome, and hard to define. The film’s opening shot, dust drifting in sunlight, gently shows what’s left behind, what doesn’t just disappear. In that lasting presence, Ratchapoom uncovers an act of defiance, a way to be seen, and a spark of transformation.
Nat, now a ghost, not only wants to reconnect with her husband; she also wants to help. She starts cleaning the factory, a place full of personal memories and political history, where a worker’s death has brought everything to a halt. As she does, spirits from Thailand’s past begin to appear, still unsettled. Through her actions, Nat pushes back against the forces that decide who gets remembered and who is forgotten.
The film’s structure matches its themes: dreams mix with reality, and stories build on each other like folded paper. Ratchapoom takes inspiration from a few great filmmakers, including Jacques Rivette, Ruiz, and Akerman, creating a world where time and logic feel flexible. Like the ghosts it shows, A Useful Ghost moves at a pace that reflects what it’s like to live with the past always close by.
Davika Hoorne’s (Ruang Talok 69) performance as Nat is surreal but believable. A major Thai star, she brings grace and wit to a role that could easily have veered into caricature. Her portrayal of a ghost who must labour for love and for recognition is quietly subversive, turning a supernatural trope into an allegory for the unseen work performed by women, the disenfranchised, and the dead alike.
Apart from it, A Useful Ghost is animated by a political intelligence. Ratchapoom subtly brings in references to Thailand’s fraught history of revolution, erasure, and authoritarian suppression. One haunting inspiration behind the film is the state-led demolition of architecture tied to the 1932 People’s Party revolution, a symbolic attempt to wipe out not only buildings but the ideals they once held. These ghostly absences, like Nat herself, are not at rest. They return, insistent and asking to be remembered.
Cinema, Ratchapoom suggests, is a ghost-making and ghost-hearing machine. In this way, A Useful Ghost becomes an act of cinematic séance, summoning the forgotten, the dust-covered, the dismissed, and telling us not to fear them, but to listen. And in listening, to love.
A Useful Ghost is strange and thoughtful, mixing serious themes with moments of humour. Undoubtedly, Ratchapoom is an exciting new voice in Thai cinema. The film combines genres to tell a moving story about those who are often overlooked. It reminds us that, like dust, ghosts may be seen as a nuisance, but they still matter.
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Written by Maggie Gogler
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