A Useful Ghost

Nat returns from the dead as a thinking household appliance, but her husband’s wealthy relatives thwart her return, fearing ghosts due to their own guilty conscience. But when she rescues the family from business troubles, Nat becomes an irreplaceable phantom asset – a useful ghost.

After her premature death, Nat reappears to her beloved husband March in the most hygienic way possible: by taking on the form and bestowing consciousness to a highly sophisticated household vacuum cleaner. But March’s snobbish and starched family opposes their renewed relationship due to prejudice and fear of ghosts. After becoming ill due to poor working conditions, a rebellious phantom worker takes revenge on them, and they are forced to close their lucrative household goods factory. Nat wins them over by ridding the factory of the presence of an embittered proletarian ghost, but this is only the beginning of her engagement as an exorcist and aide to the class enemy.

Cloaked in a light-hearted supernatural comedy, A Useful Ghost delivers a fierce and multifaceted attack on Thailand’s government and ruling elites, made up of the nouveau riche, compromised political upstarts, and hypocritical religious leaders. A Useful Ghost simultaneously exposes the hypocrisy and cruelty of the bourgeois family unit, empty religious rituals, and the tyranny of the military-industrial complex; but it also delivers a host of cinematic delights, skillfully intermeshing wacky and poignant dreams, fantasies, and stories within stories that vie for our attention within a dizzying, meandering narrative. With joy and conviction, debutant director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke restores political power to the queer; finding its expression in the outcast of all kinds, both living and non-living, and their collective struggle against gender, state, and capital.