Absurd inanimate object cinema is having a moment. Forget the simplistic joke of killer-tire movie Rubber; the forthcoming indie comedy By Design, the Sundance film from last year where Juliette Lewis “swaps bodies” with a chair, and the Thai fantasy-dramedy A Useful Ghost, where a woman’s ghost haunts a vacuum cleaner in order to reconnect with her husband, offer an emotional depth beyond their surreal, spit-take premises. In the latter, debut filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke blends Quentin Dupieux’s confrontational strangeness, Julio Torres’ melancholy whimsy, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul‘s heartfelt supernaturalism into a hilarious, affecting, surprisingly political fable.
Couched in a similarly fantastical and appliance-based frame/love story between a man with a new vacuum (Wisarut Homhuan) and the hunky repairman (Wanlop Rungkumjad) who comes to fix it, the main plot of A Useful Ghost concerns March (Wisarut Himmarat) and his late wife Nat (Davika Hoorne). Recounted as a fable born of a haunted electronics factory—where lax workplace safety standards have led to an influx of semi-vengeful spirits from recently deceased employees—the rekindled affection between March and Nat is just as likely to touch on matters of class politics as it is on the medical consequences of copulating with the business end of a vacuum hose. When Nat’s ghost makes her way into a canister vacuum while March is touring the factory, he’s sure it’s a miracle. For everyone else, it’s an episode of My Strange Addiction.
Shot with a stark, deadpan matter-of-factness, A Useful Ghost‘s style lends itself to goofy reveals played straight. Each time March is caught getting intimate with the machine housing his wife’s soul, it’s as if American Pie‘s pie-fucking scene carried with it the melancholy of our shared looming deaths. “Guy sticking his dick in a suction device” is a time-honored sex comedy gag, but rarely does the device eventually assume the form of said guy’s lost love. Even less common is when the device—thanks to her newfound foothold back in the corporeal plane—becomes more and more visible to the living, getting involved in a plot of cascading exorcisms that reflect the whitewashing of history and the systematic elimination of political undesirables.
In A Useful Ghost, spirits stick around because they’re still tied to a living being’s memory. This becomes a rich jumping-off point for the story’s larger ideas about the haves and the have-nots. The plight of a ghostly underclass—replete with ghost class traitors who collaborate with their fleshy overlords—springs naturally from the idea of a haunted factory, and those in charge are quick to target the minds of the living in order to erase the unflattering remnants of the dead. Military leaders, heads of state, and economic powerhouses all have skeletons in their closets—or dead bodies in the history books that lead back to them. For these unscrupulous Thai figures, ghostbusting-as-cover-up becomes an attractive option. And Nat, a pragmatic specter if nothing else, is quite literally a tool to be used to this end.
As A Useful Ghost sprawls out into more esoteric and ambitious sci-fi, it loses some of the quaint clarity of its focused premise, but Boonbunchachoke’s deft wielding of tones is as impressive as his ability to connect this outlandish idea to real-world evils. The relationship between Himmarat’s pliable March and Hoorne’s steely-eyed, savvy Nat evolves and expands just as A Useful Ghost skillfully mines insight from its initially silly imagery. It’s ridiculous to watch a man make out with an upholstery attachment, but it’s immediately sobering to watch a haunted vacuum make moral compromises in hope of achieving a better life. Dreamy and striking, A Useful Ghost is far more than its novelty value—and even that doesn’t suck.
Director: Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke
Writer: Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke
Starring: Davika Hoorne, Witsarut Himmarat, Apasiri Nitibhon, Wanlop Rungkumjad, Wisarut Homhuan
Release Date: January 16, 2026
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