A Useful Ghost

Nat comes back from the dead as a sentient home appliance, only to be rejected by her ghost-phobic, upper-class in-laws. But when she helps the family out of business trouble, Nat becomes an indispensable phantom asset – a useful ghost.

After her premature death, Nat returns to her loving husband March in the most hygienic way imaginable: by haunting a high-end vacuum cleaner. March’s prissy business family, however, opposes this reunion, having shut down their appliance factory due to a phantom menace. Nat wins them over by helping them liberate the factory, but that is only the beginning of her job as a ghostbuster.

If A Useful Ghost sounds like a harmless comic fantasy, it’s a deception. Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s explosive debut is nothing short of a ferocious, multipronged attack on the Thai establishment. The filmmaker’s velvet-gloved fist lands at once on the hypocrisies of the bourgeois family unit, the cruelty of the religious elite and the tyranny of the military-industrial complex. 

But this lovingly crafted box of cinephile delights is foremost an ode to storytelling, with dreams, fantasies and tales within tales jostling for space within the giddy, shape-shifting narrative. With joy and conviction, A Useful Ghost reclaims the political force of queerness, whose expression it finds in outsiders of all kinds, living and inanimate. Supported by IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund in 2023, and winner of the Grand Prize at Cannes Critics’ Week 2025.

– Srikanth Srinivasan

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