‘A Useful Ghost’ Review: A Quirky Yet Profound Tale About A Haunted Vacuum Cleaner [Cannes 2025]
Every once in a while at a film festival, I stumble upon a film so strange and quirky that I can’t help being won over by its audaciousness and that perfectly describes writer/director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s heartbreaking and profound debut, A Useful Ghost. Premiering at the Critics’ Week section at Cannes, it made history as it won the prestigious Grand Prix award, the first Thai film to receive this honor. It’s unlike any other ghost story I’ve seen this year—and that’s before a man and vacuum cleaner begin to passionately make love (more on that later).
It’s easy to reduce a film like this—whose premise revolves around phantasms who return to take over everyday objects—to its most shocking moments like the one described above. But to do so overlooks the thematic complexity at the heart of Boonbunchachoke’s story. It’s a haunting meditation on how memory is a powerful act of defiance for those who live in a system that dehumanizes and oppresses at a numbingly mechanical pace.
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A Useful Ghost opens when a self-diagnosed “Academic Ladyboy” (Wisarut Homhuan) purchases a vacuum cleaner to help clean the pervasive dust in his home. He buys a top-of-the-line machine but is disappointed to discover it’s broken. When he calls for someone to service the device, he’s taken aback by the arrival of the Krong (Wanlop Rungkumjad). Homhuan’s character is immediately drawn to this attractive stranger and Krong uses his influence to tell another story around a widower, March (Witsarut Himmarat), and his wife, Nat (Davika Hoorne) who came back as a vacuum cleaner, having previously died due to dust poisoning from a family factory. These two stories converge in interesting and clever ways, but for most of the film’s runtime, we’re caught under Krong’s spell. He describes that March is overjoyed that Nat has come back to him, her return as a cleaning appliance being of no concern to him.
These initial sequences where Nat and March are reunited are where Boonbunchachoke, cinematographer Pasit Tandaechanurat, and editor Chonlasit Upanigkit deliver some of the film’s strongest and most hilarious beats, as their combined skills find the humanity within the absurdity. For example, after hearing that March is ill with the same dust sickness that killed her, Nat goes to visit him. As a red vacuum cleaner, hose and brush upright, she trudges along the city streets and up the ramp and steps to March’s hospital. When Nat gets to the main desk, she’s stopped by the receptionist, who’s less concerned that she’s interfacing with a haunted vacuum, and more cross that Nat is trying to visit past visiting hours. Furthermore, since Nat has died, the receptionist reminds, that she’s technically no longer family, and doesn’t get special visiting privileges.
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It’s a ridiculous exchange and cleverly, Boonbunchachoke uses this to illustrate the nonsensical bureaucracy on behalf of these larger corporations that persists even beyond death. A majority of the film’s laughs can come from the way Tandaechanurat has framed Nat, in vacuum form, sitting in these waiting halls or from how Upanigkit cuts to a close-up of Nat’s intake port and brush (which act as her de facto “face”) after something preposterous is said. Nat’s treatment by these forces is a microcosm of how other, less powerful figures have to navigate these spaces.
While A Useful Ghost finds much to poke fun at with its ghost in the machine, Boonbunchachoke’s story soon shifts to a more prescient mode, which also coincides with Homhuan’s character’s realization of Krong’s true intentions. Krong reveals that March’s family is less than pleased with Nat’s return, as it does not look good for their factory business if their successor is in a relationship with a machine. Match’s mother confronts Nat and tells her that if she wants to remain with Match, she has to make herself useful.
The primary way Nat can do this is by purging the vengeful ghosts who have been killed due to the unsafe working conditions in March’s mother’s factory and are disrupting the workflow. Nat reluctantly agrees and becomes a ruthless exterminator, forcefully exorcising ghosts who won’t comply. Ghosts are only able to remain rooted in the physical world if someone remembers them, and while Nat combats ghosts in the spiritual realm, March’s family tries to brainwash people with ties to the ghosts and make them forget.
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It’s tragic to witness Nat, even in death, still have to prove her worth; a reminder of the ways the systems we live in have an uncanny power to subjugate from beyond the grave. Nat’s acceptance is conditional upon her usefulness, and there’s a striking specificity to March’s family’s process in getting rid of dissenters, both alive and dead. Boonbunchachoke complicates Nat’s character as she garners our empathy for wanting to not be forgotten, but also our ire as she becomes a tool of the very thing that killed her. The more Nat quells other ghosts, the more she’s able to spend time in her “human” form. Hoorne gives a chilling performance, portraying Nat’s descent into inhumanity with automated precision while still keeping a glimmer of internal conflict behind her brown eyes.
Ultimately, Boonbunchachoke ever so delicately weaves notes of hope into this story of a ghost turned ghostbuster. Nat is later recruited by Thailand’s prime minister to help get rid of the ghosts of protestors and dissidents who have been killed by his entourage. Yet the more Nat presses into her work to gain acceptance by humans, the more March feels alienated from her. While she conducts her raids, he spends time trying to remember the voices and names of those who’ve passed so they won’t be forgotten.
As someone says in the film “Ghosts are those who don’t give in to death,” citing their “very return is an act of protest.” March’s presence becomes a way for Nat to remember this aspect of her restoration. The film becomes about how remembrance in the face of extermination is an iconoclastic act of defiance. Dying is not as bad as being forgotten, and A Useful Ghost is a spectral ode to the defiant power of memory.
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A Useful Ghost
Summary
A Useful Ghost is a spectral ode to the defiant power of memory.
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