A still from ‘A Useful Ghost’
A vacuum cleaner haunted by a ghost is the kind of one-liner which can draw in a festival audience looking for a little light-hearted fun to fill the time slots available between the “heavier” films which require much closer attention. A useful ghost, the debut feature of Thai filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke being screened in the world cinema category at the 30th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), even appears so in the initial hour. Until, the film becomes something more, with strong undercurrents of Thailand’s contemporary political history.
A person who has just purchased a new vacuum cleaner is woken up at night by the machine’s loud coughing. As it turns out, the vacuum cleaner is haunted by a factory worker who had died on the job. The loud coughs are his expression of anger against the vacuum cleaner company, which he believes had caused his death. It is not the only haunted vacuum cleaner in town. The company owner’s son appears to be in love with a vacuum cleaner possessed by Nat, his dead wife. All this is fodder for much humour which punctuates the initial half of the film.
In a way, this treatment also lulls the viewer into assuming that the love story between man and machine might be intended as a backdrop for the filmmaker’s take on air pollution induced by the constant stream of development projects. That is until we learn about the existence of the “useful” ghosts and the inconvenient ghosts. Nat, now considered a useful ghost, is approached by the political and military establishment to read the dreams of the inconvenient ghosts who have been haunting the political leaders for the cruelties of the past.
The film reveals its contemporary connections at this juncture, when we realise that the inconvenient ghosts are those of the ‘Red Shirt’ protesters who faced intense repression from the Thai military in 2010. According to news reports from that time, around 90 mostly unarmed civilians who were protesting raising demands for timely elections were killed in the crackdown, while thousands sustained injuries. The military crackdown was also accompanied by the closure of media seen to be supportive of the protesters.
Boonbunchachoke’s film, which blends multiple genres in the service of its sweeping theme, expects the viewer to submit to its internal logic. This involves not just ghosts possessing machines, but also the possibility of reading others’ dreams as well as the ghosts disappearing when their memory is wiped away from the minds of the living. The last possibility is at the heart of the film’s potent message, that of the struggle of memory against forgetting, to keep alive even the recent historical memories when it is being erased and rewritten in real-time.
The screenwriter squeezes in quite a few elements which at times makes the film a bit unwieldy and meandering. It also strives a little too much in driving home the point, when a final reveal about the underlying theme could have done the job far more effectively. Yet, the film stands out for its inventiveness in using a humourous ghost story to coat what is a difficult story to tell. The film is Thailand’s official entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the Academy Awards this year.
Published – December 17, 2025 08:13 pm IST
