A Useful Ghost

It’s probably also the only movie ever made about a possessed vacuum cleaner, but that’s hardly Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s fault. The debuting Thai filmmaker, who wrote and directed this deceptively bittersweet romance about the porous boundaries between our world and the next, knows how to capture — and, more importantly, reward — the viewer’s attention. Between its opening line and its violent climax, A Useful Ghost shifts between tones and genres as confidently as a spirit bouncing from one appliance to another.

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Those jumps aren’t always seamless but, like a good vacuum, the film is more than the sum of its parts. “Mere particles of dust in the room changed my ladyboy life forever” is the opening line in question, and it’s spoken by a character whose name is never said aloud but is credited as Academic Ladyboy (Wisarut Homhuan). He buys a vacuum to take care of the dust in question, only to be woken that same night by what sounds like someone coughing despite living alone — ghosts need unobstructed airways too, after all. His moniker comes from his next line: “I had to get to the bottom of this, since I’m an academic ladyboy.”

He does so with help from a bottle-blonde repairman who mysteriously shows up mere seconds after he calls customer service. The identity of his vacuum’s possessor remains a mystery throughout as the repairman tells the story of two other ghosts who refuse to move on to whatever awaits them on the other side. The narrative gets a bit convoluted from there, but the world-building, lore, and production design ensure that A Useful Ghost is never less than compelling.

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Different kinds of ghosts haunt the film, all with similar, overlapping origins. The factory where the vacuum was made is a hotbed of spiritual activity, and poltergeists have been known to jump between industrial machinery and appliances alike. No one seems especially surprised by this, and Suman, who runs the factory, is mostly offended that the ghost of a worker who died on the premises is harassing her and her employees after she went to the trouble of paying for the noodles at his funeral. “The dead shouldn’t mess with the living,” she reasons. “Move on to your next life.” Would that it were so simple.

A Useful Ghost is never less than compelling.

Apasiri Nitibhon is monotone perfection as Suman, who never raises her voice or looks any more bothered by her poltergeist than she would be by improperly filed paperwork. This isn’t her first rodeo, after all: Suman’s daughter-in-law Nat (Davika Hoorne) recently died and returned as a vacuum in an attempt to reconnect with her husband March (Witsarut Himmarat), who, either out of love or a paranormal connection to the dearly departed, sees her not as a cleaning appliance but as the woman he married. Hilariously, Suman and the rest of the in-laws are none too pleased with Nat’s return — not because she’s a vacuum but because they never cared for her when she was alive.

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That plainness of speech and nonplussed reaction to spiritual phenomena is of a piece with the films of fellow Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, with whose Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives likewise used ghosts as avatars for collective memory in a nation still reckoning with its past. The difficulty in determining who might be haunting the Ladyboy’s vacuum lies in the fact that lots of workers have died at lots of factories, the repairman tells him in one of the film’s more explicit hints as to its corporeal concerns. Once the novelty of these particular ghosts’ existence wears off, Boonbunchachoke wants us to focus on their plight: unable or unwilling to move on and afraid, above all else, of being forgotten. Maybe the dead worry about the same things as the living.