“A Useful Ghost”: A Haunted Vacuum Cleaner Carries a Love Story Grief Refuses to Let Go Of

There’s a ghost in the machine — quite literally. Thai director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke‘s Cannes-winning feature debut, A Useful Ghost, now streaming on Mubi, turns a haunted vacuum cleaner into one of the year’s most unexpectedly moving love stories.

The film follows Nat, who has died from a respiratory illness, only for her spirit to occupy a vacuum cleaner manufactured by her mother-in-law Suman’s company. Her husband March is elated, seeing his dead wife where everyone else just sees an appliance. It sounds whimsical on paper, but the film has far bigger ambitions. Boonbunchachoke uses this stubborn, undying love as a metaphor for his country’s denial of its own brutal past. scrollscroll

A Useful Ghost: Overview

The story is told in flashback, centered on Nat, her husband March, and his mother Suman. It turns out Nat’s isn’t the only spirit floating around — several ghosts have settled into vacuum cleaners rolling out of Suman’s factory, and Nat herself takes up residence in a crimson model that follows a grieving March everywhere, to the horror of Suman’s extended family. Priests get called in, an exorcism is attempted — but neither Nat nor March is ready to let go of what they had. scroll + 3

What elevates the film beyond its quirky premise is how deliberately it’s built. Nat is written as gentle compared to Tok, an ill-tempered poltergeist terrorizing the same factory’s workers, and her reason for staying behind ties directly into Thailand’s recent history. The film uses her presence to quietly explore air pollution, homophobia, political repression, and workplace safety — all while staying visually precise, using stillness, frontal framing, and deadpan humour to hold it together. scrollscroll

Thailand’s cinema has long drawn on its cultural belief in spirits coexisting with the living, a tradition well documented on Wikipedia, and this film adds a quietly political new chapter to that lineage.

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