A Useful Ghost

Grand Prix, 2025 Cannes Critics’ Week
Thailand’s Best International Film Submission, 2026 Academy Awards

“Mere particles of dust in the room changed my ladyboy life forever.” When dust–left by the tearing down of a historical monument for the construction of a megamall–blows into the room of our unnamed protagonist, she purchases a vacuum cleaner online, which she later discovers is possessed by a ghost. A sexy repairman arrives to investigate, revealing a widespread phenomenon of vengeful spirits inhabiting the electrical appliances produced at factories whose precarious working conditions led to their deaths. Nat, the daughter-in-law of a factory owner who recently died of dust poisoning, possesses another vacuum cleaner to reunite with her husband March. Their odd reunion as man and vacuum cleaner is scorned by March’s disapproving family, but Nat proves her usefulness as an exorcist, targeting other ghosts whose hauntings are less savory by more powerful political actors.

Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke has previously displayed a knack for manipulating tone and genre with Red Aninsri; Or, Tiptoeing on The Still Trembling Berlin Wall (SDAFF ‘20). With his debut feature, Boonbunchachoke takes an absurd premise, playing with the erotic relationship between man and machine, but deftly weaves into it moments of genuine humanist drama and political critique in a country where dust pollution has become an issue of increasing concern. As in life, death is also political, and haunting functions as an act of resistance against national forgetting and the mechanisms of power that seek to erase historical memory.

– Justin Nguyen