Useful Ghost Movie Review
USEFUL GHOST
After Nat’s tragic death from dust pollution, March sinks into mourning. But his daily life is turned upside down when he discovers that his wife’s spirit has been reincarnated in a vacuum cleaner. Though absurd, their bond is reborn, stronger than ever—but far from unanimous. Her family, already haunted by a previous factory accident, rejects this supernatural relationship. Trying to convince them of their love, Nat offers to clean up the factory to prove she’s a useful ghost, even if it means cleaning up among the wandering souls…
Film Review
Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s first feature film, which won the Grand Prix at Critics’ Week, Useful Ghost initially stands out as a phantasmagorical and resolutely absurd fable, where the grotesque serves to unfold its many themes. By adopting a dazzling, burlesque, and disconcerting aesthetic language, the Thai director develops a dual narrative, where the intimate and the societal merge through an improbable plot. Behind this zany proposition (the spirit of a woman is reincarnated in a vacuum cleaner) lies a multitude of levels of interpretation, where each fantastical element becomes a meaningful symbol. The film deploys an implicit critique of the oppressive structures of contemporary Thai society, under the guise of surreal humor.
Useful Ghost begins with what appears to be a teeming, almost chaotic display of symbols representing a myriad of narrative and thematic avenues. The story touches on the ecological question, the working class condition, alienation in productivism, the female condition, and extraordinary loves in the face of capitalist and religious logic, all without ever lingering on them. This profusion gives the whole a confused character, setting a dense but fragmented symbolic backdrop.
However, a shift occurs in the second half of the film, a radical plunge into a darker, more abundant, and resolutely nihilistic register. The filmmaker ultimately decides to take hold of one of these issues and explore it more deeply. This change of tone marks a critical turning point: where the first part distils its political charge under grotesque trappings, the second unfolds a frontally political narrative, with chilling aspects.
Nat’s character, already reduced to an object, becomes a “useful ghost,” that is, a docile tool placed at the service of a revisionist state. The story then takes a sinister turn, as the ghosts collaborate with the living to erase the most cumbersome traces of the past: the wandering souls of those sacrificed in war, those forgotten by repression, and the political victims of Thailand’s recent history.
Useful Ghost goes beyond social criticism to establish itself as a poetics of memory: the erasure of memory is a tool for shaping reality in the present. Therefore, keeping alive the memory of struggles, of the dominated, of the invisible is vital to the freedom of a people. This thesis is deeply rooted here in the political and social context permeated by the post-repression protests of 2010, which marked a turning point in Thailand’s history.
Useful Ghost is a work that demands that we fully surrender to it, without seeking to grasp or rationalize everything. To embrace a multitude of themes, the film deploys an arsenal of symbolism that tends to saturate the narrative space. This symbolic richness as a method of representation offers vast formal freedom and an assumed stylistic heterogeneity, at the cost, however, of a dispersion in the narrative that pushes it to sweep across the major questions of Thai society without granting them the necessary depth. Except the theme of memory, treated with more purity, which offers a more accessible ground for reflection on its ethical, political, and societal issues.