“A Useful Ghost”

Hilariously strange, quietly devastating, and deadpan to its core, writer / director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke‘s “A Useful Ghost” is a pitch black comedy that leans into its weird premise with intensity. This is a very, very funny film that’s original and deeply strange, and I loved every single minute of its oddball quirkiness.

Nat (Davika Hoorne) is a wife and mother who dies from air pollution and returns as a ghost possessing a vacuum cleaner. Wanting to protect her son from the same fate, Nat aims to become a “useful ghost.” This means she also helps her husband get rid of the bad spirits who are haunting his vacuum cleaner factory.

What makes this film so funny is how matter-of-fact everyone is about people are being reincarnated into household appliances. Machinery talks, ghosts haunt the factory floor, and nobody treats this as particularly abnormal. It’s just another Tuesday in ghost-riddled suburbia.

That’s the deadpan genius of the film. The supernatural is not treated as shocking or even particularly remarkable, but just inconvenient like a stubborn stain on a rug or a power outage. Despite being full of the angry spirits of dead laborers who have unionized postmortem, the factory continues cranking out goods. The tone is slightly sarcastic, the delivery dry, and all of it is hysterical.

Vacuum-ghost Nat is both tragic and hilarious. She cleans with purpose. She chases out other “useless” ghosts. She tries to protect her son, reunite with her husband, and maybe redeem the factory. The ghosts complain. They gossip. They cling to their old machines. And the humans? They just kind of roll with it, like your blender whispering secrets to you is an expected part of grief.

What starts off as darkly whimsical slowly transforms into something much heavier (especially when the film reaches its final act). There’s love, tragedy, and a sharp critique of industrial exploitation and environmental decay, all filtered through a haunted vacuum cleaner.

Visually, the film is quiet and beautiful, with long takes, dramatic shifts in natural light, and subtle plays between shadows and a soft glow. It may be minimalist, but the visual vibe perfectly expresses the blurring of lines between life and the afterlife.

In the end, “A Useful Ghost” is not your average specter movie (it’s not even a typical black comedy). It’s a film that delivers something much stranger, yet somehow more sincere, in its story about love, labor, pollution, and the impossible task of cleaning up the messes we leave behind.

By: Louisa Moore