There’s a ghost in the machine in writer/director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s humorous and haunting gem of a feature debut “A Useful Ghost.” However, this is no mere twisty supernatural horror to be forced into neat genre classifications. It’s a work that flaunts all expectations with a disposition as gloriously and gracefully silly as it is incisive and illuminating.
For one thing, the machine in question is a humble vacuum cleaner and it is now being possessed by the wandering, lonely spirit of a woman desperately seeking to remain in the land of the living with her husband after she dies. For another, she is but one ghost of many who must grapple with the layered agonies of a world that cares not for those who get destroyed in the pursuit of power, wealth, and supposed “progress.” It’s with this supernatural conceit that the film playfully and poetically ponders who such progress is truly for, pushing us to look closer at the casual cruelties underpinning it. The result is a film as wryly funny as it is thoughtfully, profoundly and boldly whimsical. Every detail, be they the mirthful jokes or the melancholic meditations it taps into, comes together to create a vision that’s existentially resonant. It proves Boonbunchachoke is not just an exciting new voice who pays respect to the ghosts of cinema’s past, but one who finds distinct beauty as he brings them all to joyous life.
Premiering Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival, it all begins with a simple yet revealing shot of dust floating in the air. It’s a peaceful, almost serene opening, though it carries with it a quietly eerie and evocative energy that will become the heart of the rest of the film that follows. As we come to see, dust, much like ghosts, is something ubiquitous in modern Thailand. Even when it goes unacknowledged, it’s in the air the characters breathe and is capable of ripping the very breath from their lungs. It’s this dust pollution that kills Nat (Davika Hoorne) and leaves her husband March (Wisarut Himmarat) mourning her without much sympathy from his family. When she returns as a vacuum, March is overjoyed as he is just happy to have his love back with him. His family, on the other hand, is disapproving and considers the relationship unnatural. Thus, Nat attempts to prove her worth by cleansing their factory of any other ghosts that haunt it.
Told through a conversation looking back on this story that requires being a bit coy due to some key revelations that come later in the film, it relies on a familiar framing mechanism that was used in Boonbunchachoke’s fascinating short film “Red Aninsri; Or, Tiptoeing on the Still Trembling Berlin Wall.” However, “A Useful Ghost” is a more self-assured work, finding greater intimacies just as it becomes more thematically expansive without ever losing sight of its sense of humor. At times, it more closely resembles an episode of the spectacular series “Los Espookys” or the recent underrated film “Chronicles of a Wandering Saint” in how it merges whimsy with wonder, though it’s also a distinct work that defies any such easy comparisons. The key to this is how Boonbunchachoke unabashedly and wholeheartedly leans into the film’s absurdist streak before tapping into something potent about the importance of remembering.
The film initially gets a lot of mileage out of the sight gag of seeing a vacuum navigating her way back to her love — one shot of it creakily wheeling its way up an incline is oddly beautiful and memorably absurd in the assured hands of cinematographer Pasit Tandaechanurat. At the same time, when Hoorne eventually steps into the character’s shoes (or vacuum wheels), she strikes a perfect balance between ghostly reserve and deep human pain. It’s a tough role, but she plays it with a gently haunting grace. In one conversation near the end, the emotions that subtly cross her face are simply shattering.
Similarly, Boonbunchachoke’s film is an increasingly mesmerizing tightrope act as, alongside the delightfully staged haunting sequences, a more grim sense of dread starts to steadily make its way into the frame. Dreams, memory and history all become intertwined as the task assigned to Nat reveals itself as being about destroying the minds and pasts of others. This is how she, and all of us, are expected to be useful. Before you realize it, the supposedly stable ground beneath the film’s feet disappears, leaving you in a state of freefall. Yet in the fall, Boonbunchachoke remains in complete control, delicately deploying potent visuals. Credit must also be given to the production design of one particular space, which manages to be a site of violence that is also coldly clinical, ensuring moments of silent pain all cut that much deeper.
As this reaches its climax, with key bursts of sex and violence serving as fleeting moments of resistance to the destruction that societies often build themselves on, the steady accumulation of its emotional resonances makes it impossible to shake. So much of what “A Useful Ghost” is doing feels like it shouldn’t work, but that only makes it all the more exciting to see how it does.
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