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| Director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke |
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| director on the set |
A USEFUL GHOST (Pee chai dai ka) B- Thailand Singapore Germany France (130 mi) 2025 d: Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke
Ghosts are those who don't give in to Death, their very return is an act of protest.
Sort of a cross between Tim Burton’s BEETLEJUICE (1988) and Michael Gondry’s ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS KIND (2004), as returning ghosts are on a mission to haunt the living, where the only way to eradicate their power is to scrub them from our memories. Film festivals are about discovering new talent, new ideas, and new artistic visions, and sometimes they’re about the recirculation of old ideas, something we’ve seen before, where it’s hard not to think of fellow Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendor (Rak ti Khon Kaen) (2015), which was actually a retread of his own idiosyncratic vision that we experienced earlier with SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY (2006), his Cannes Palme d’Or winning UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES (2010), and even Mekong Hotel (2012). Thailand has a turbulent political history, marked by military coups, protests, and deadly crackdowns, leading to people who were punished or disappeared altogether. The filmmaker began writing the film in 2017, three years after the military seized power in a coup, arresting its critics and pressuring news outlets into self-censorship. The film’s obsession with memory and mind control is inspired by a creeping trend that emerged under the junta of destroying historical monuments commemorating the 1932 revolution (Time to Truly Understand Thailand's 1932 Revolution), when the absolute monarchy was overthrown and democracy introduced to Thailand. Winner of the Critics’ Week Grand Prize (1st Place) at Cannes, written by Boonbunchachoke and Geoffroy Grison, this audaciously bizarre ghost story is filled with elaborate side journeys into the unclassifiable, “Do you think dreams are images of tragic memories?” punctuated by moments of social reckoning, “A ghost is less hygienic than a speck of dust,” where incredulously, a refrigerator and a vacuum cleaner get into an all-out brawl. Your head may spin at the sheer outrageousness of just what’s happening onscreen, and while at times it can be a hilarious delight, it also loses steam in the narrative overkill, becoming disconnected with viewers in just how outlandish it tries to be. It’s a weird concoction of quirky ideas that are initially startling in their conception, weaving together multiple plotlines, but it goes on far too long with the introduction of additional characters and subplots that dilute the story’s focus, as you sort of get the point midway through, yet it just keeps going, becoming nearly incomprehensible in the overlapping detail that feels repetitive after a while. Nonetheless, some will absolutely love this film, while others may be turned off by the meandering style that loses its intensity, seemingly in need of better editing. What’s perhaps most shocking is the openness of its depiction of several gay men, one of whom endearingly describes himself as an Academic Ladyboy (Kathoey, typically a derisive term for transgender women), as well as the prevalence of male nudity onscreen, never veering into anything graphic, yet it’s such a natural extension of its humanness, but it’s still surprising as so few other films are as broad-minded.
Opening with the chiseling of a historical relic, a mural depicting students, workers, a monk, and a soldier, yet the dismantling for the construction of a shopping mall leaves an image of dust floating in the air, a world where dust and ghosts co-exist, a metaphor for people who lack the power to determine their own lives, who are easily swept aside by the will of the ruling class. We are soon introduced to a self-described Academic Ladyboy (Wisarut Homhuan), who has a picture of the mural on his wall, yet his apartment has been covered with dust, “There is no progress without dust,” a city official says on television, so he decides to purchase a vacuum cleaner, but after tidying up his apartment, he hears the appliance coughing all night, only to discover all the dust it collected has been expelled back onto the floor. “Mere particles of dust in the room changed my ladyboy life forever.” So he calls for a repairman, who arrives instantly, the moment he hangs up the phone, Krong (Wanlop Rungkumjad), discovering there’s nothing mechanically wrong with it, but that it’s haunted by a ghost, as apparently they’ve been roaming the area, while the factory that produced the product has also been inundated by ghosts. Intrigued by what he hears, as well as the man delivering the message, he allows Krong to stay with him, who turns out to be the gay ghost of an executed political activist, which allows him to describe what amounts to a ghost story, a story within a story, much of it expressed through voiceover and deadpan humor, but as he tells the story behind the ghosts, a tale that shifts over time, the film returns intermittently to this storyteller and his listener, who soon begin a sexual relationship, but the heart of the film lies in the mysterious tale he recounts. A young woman has died due to complications from dust pollution, and her grieving husband later discovers that her spirit has returned to him by possessing a vacuum cleaner. Also we learn that wealthy vacuum cleaner factory owner Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon) was forced to shut down her factory by the vengeful ghost of a former employee, Tok (Krittin Thongmai), who died of congenital heart disease on the premises, blaming the environment for his death, and literally haunting the place afterwards. Her son March (Witsarut Himmarat) is mourning the recent loss of his wife Nat (former model and Thai superstar Davika Hoorne) and their unborn child from a respiratory disease. While Suman’s factory is being investigated for ghosts, March happens to see the spirit of Nat possess a vacuum cleaner, which in turn possesses March. Understandably, his family rejects this unconventional human-ghost relationship, resembling the forbidden relationships that LGBTQ people have faced throughout history, so she attempts to win them over by making herself “useful” in exorcising the family factory from the unwanted spirits who have shut the building down. More than a little ridiculous, the idea of seeing a human engage in sex with a vacuum cleaner is what this film is all about, as it defies belief, but plants a searing image that is sure to generate laughs, but also makes a point that ghosts are kept alive by those who remember them.
According to a Buddhist monk, “Ghosts come back for two reasons: because they remember or because they are remembered.” So this ghost story may actually be a strange and mysterious kind of love story that thrives in a world of artifice and theatricality. Essentially a story about a love that wants to overcome death, inspired by the traditional legend of Mae Nak, a well-known Thai ghost that is part of popular culture, featured in many films and TV shows, expressing a forbidden love story between a female ghost and her living husband. The director decided to take an iconic character that Thai audiences were already familiar with and then subvert their expectations by exploring outlandish new possibilities while revisiting classism and oppression throughout Thailand’s history, with political leaders finding themselves haunted by the ghosts of their own atrocities, having slaughtered innocent civilians during the 2010 Thai military crackdown. Adding a dreamy quality to the work, blurring the boundary between the supernatural and what’s real, ghosts manifest themselves through voices alone, as they’re missing visible bodies, while others are altogether invisible, yet they’re capable of moving objects. Thailand is a country filled with ghosts, known as phi, referring to the diverse spirits and ghosts in Thai folklore, deeply rooted in animism and Buddhist traditions, associated with so many forced disappearances and unresolved murders, leaving their spirits in a state of limbo between life and death. To that end, among the more outrageous ideas are the electroshock and dream therapy rooms designed to make people forget their memories, as Suman is not happy about this unconventional relationship and tries to eradicate the ghost by wiping out March’s memory through electroshock therapy, emblematic of mechanisms of power that seek to erase historical memory, mirroring gay conversion therapies and the dismantling of the past, especially citizens of the lower classes, voiceless people who are indiscriminately displaced within society. Add to that the strange configurated shapes of a vacuum cleaner, which in this story has a way of expressing its own feelings and developing human attachments, so it’s only natural that humans would form their own sort of attachment as well. When March starts developing the same troubling symptoms that took the life of Nat, she comes back to look after him, assuming human form, wearing a blue dress with padded shoulders, offering her own tender protection while fending off the more aggressively hostile ghosts, with the film exploring themes of mortality, devotion, and the fragile bond that lingers between the living and the dead. What initially sounds like an absurd premise becomes a clever way of asking what really makes a life, or even a ghost, useful in a world that often overlooks care and compassion, revealing how love fills the missing gap that healthcare and other major institutions fail to address. It‘s a bit overambitious with its multitude of ideas and trying to do too much, as it deals with memory, retribution, grief, and queer sexuality, among other things, feeling exposition-heavy and absurdly over-exaggerated, and while it’s often deviously entertaining, the film works much better conceptually than it does in execution, with no clear voice that brings any of this together, as it lacks emotional complexity, yet at the center of it all is a gay ghost that refuses to be forgotten.
