Vague Visages’ A Useful Ghost review contains minor spoilers. Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s 2025 movie features Davika Hoorne, Wisarut Homhuan and Wanlop Rungkumjad. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, the director of A Useful Ghost (Thailand’s official Oscar submission for the Best International Film category), was inspired to make cinema by watching pirated DVDs he found in Bangkok market stores. His debut film is greatly concerned with the recent political history of Thailand and the heavy burden the nation’s residents carry in not being able to speak frankly, due to the lèse-majesté laws which prohibit defamation or libel of the monarchy and can lead to a 15-year prison sentence. As such, Boonbunchachoke’s feature debut relies heavily on metaphors to get its point across. The writer-director also buries, perhaps out of necessity, hard-hitting political declarations through comedic hijinks and soft-horror tropes. As interesting as A Useful Ghost is in concept, it’s a typical film by a talented debut artist and storyteller, one with a litany of ideas but no clear voice that brings them together. 

Ghost stories are one of the most integral popular cultural elements in Thailand mythologies and are reflected in art and literature throughout the country. The most recognizable to a western cinephile audience would probably be in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Palme d’Or-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). In A Useful Ghost, the spirits are also channels for a collective memory through dreams. The initial mystery of the film revolves around a nameless young man (Wisarut Homhuan) who refers to himself as a “Ladyboy.” At night, he hears a voice coughing and also a brand new vacuum cleaner that has stopped working. The protagonist receives a visit from a mysterious stranger (Wanlop Rungkumjad) who tells him the vacuum cleaner is haunted by a ghost. The man goes through several ghost stories, many about workers who have died at a local factory due to unsafe conditions. This leads the stranger to discuss lovers named March (Wisarut Himmarat) and Nat (Davika Hoorne), the latter of whom died under similar circumstances and comes back to be with her partner, much to the chagrin of March’s mother, Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon) — the owner of the local factory that seems to be the suspect zero of all these illnesses. 

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What is immediately noticeable and memorable about A Useful Ghost is the beautiful dissolves, along with the transitions via Boonbunchachoke and veteran Thai editor Chonlasit Upanigkit. The filmmakers highlight the dreamlike quality of their design, weaving images together like a knot or web. This is often depicted explicitly through an expanding circle from a character’s head into the next image, but the more effective transitions are slow dissolves that imitate the feeling of an object disappearing or turning to wind and dust. At the beginning of the film, a stone carving (which is set to be demolished) slowly fades out as an image of leaves blowing on the ground appears. The airy background and soft lighting of A Useful Ghost’s dream sequences complement each other and highlight the film’s beauty.

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A Useful Ghost’s political angle quickly expands from just the malpractices of a local factory to the Thai government leadership. The heavy metaphor of the film eventually culminates into a moral play on how the erasure of memory is the erasure of history. The 2010 military crackdown by the Thai government on its people left 81 dead and many other injured. This event left a large mark on the populace. In A Useful Ghost, Nat’s return as a ghost prompts the military and its associates to use her as a means of drawing out and disappearing other ghosts through memory erasure of the living populace. Her still-alive husband, however, keeps the memory of these individuals alive by reading literature and news accounts of their deaths. A Useful Ghost highlights an intriguing and illustrative way to depict knowledge and collective memory as a key component of sparking some kind of change. 

But A Useful Ghost also undercuts its tones and turns into a jarring juxtaposition of two or even three different kinds of films that simply doesn’t coalesce. This certainly keeps the movie interesting in its innate weirdness, but it doesn’t make it much fun to watch, and Boonbunchachoke doesn’t make any cogent point, despite the sermonizing of several characters in the final act. A Useful Ghost starts off as an absurdist sex comedy, where Nat’s reincarnation as a vacuum cleaner leads to several hijinks of March copulating with an electrical appliance (to the shock of his mother and relatives), but the director then attempts to make his movie gravely serious as well as romantic. While this is an ambitious approach for a debut filmmaker, the disparate tonalities feel like they fight with each other instead of flowing together.

Soham Gadre (@SohamGadre) is a writer/filmmaker based in Washington, D.C. He has contributed to publications such as Bustle, Frameland and Film Inquiry. Soham is currently in production for his first short film. All of his film and writing work can be found at extrasensoryfilms.com.

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