A Useful Ghost Review: Thai Anti-Capitalist Surrealist Fantasy Comedy-Drama With Possessed Vacuum Cleaners Will Break Your Heart

Dust swirls in the city. Buildings have been systematically dismantled in the name of progress, kicking up fatal levels of pollution. “There is no progress without dust,” a city official says on television. This is just how things are, we’re told. People die, sometimes. It’s for good reason. You want to live in a modern city, no? Sometimes we have to accept the bad with the good. Though on that spectrum, where does one place the possession of vacuum cleaners by the recently deceased?

A Useful Ghost, the feature debut by Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, hides its overwhelming level of political allegory within the stitching of deadpan melodramatic pulp. Underneath its story of the sudden animation of household products is a layered critique of late-stage capitalism, a plea for the humanity of queer folks, a rebuke of the erasure of history and of memory, and a challenge against traditionalism which holds back a people from necessarily breaking free, to the next stage of life.

To be sure, that’s too much to take on. Boonbunchachoke knows that, and the film feels overstuffed as a matter of course. So, too, is our current sociopolitical climate, in which everything feels connected in an overwhelming spider-web of ills. A Useful Ghost does not always work, but when it does, it channels the comedic stylings of Wes Anderson and the reverie-like approach of Apichatpong Weerasethakul in an entirely singular, deeply affecting story of love and loss.

A Useful Ghost Takes On Too Much. That’s Part of Its Bizarre Charm.

A Useful Ghost is a story told in folkloric memory. It begins as a self-proclaimed “Academic Ladyboy” (Wisarut Homhuan), a gay bachelor, has trouble getting his brand-new vacuum to keep its contents inside its bag. Worse still, at night, he hears a man uncontrollably coughing. “I don’t remember getting a husband,” he says, and the coughing seems to be emanating from his new cleaning machine. Mere seconds after calling the help line the next day, Krong appears (Wanlop Rungkumjad), a technician equipped with an epic story of similarly possessed cleaners amidst the dust storm.

In this story, Nat (Davika Hoorne), the daughter-in-law of Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon), a vacuum factory owner, dies from dust pollution before immediately possessing a brand new, sparkling red cleaner with a long white hose. Her body has died, but “not her love,” and she seeks out her husband, March (Witsarut Himmarat), to take care of him in his grief. He can see her in her bodily form, dressed in an oversized bright blue blazer with shoulder pads that make her look like David Byrne in Stop Making Sense, but everyone else just sees a red square.

This is not the first time Suman has had to deal with a possessed vacuum cleaner, and, despite its oddity, no one seems all that shocked by its occurrence. This is a world where ghosts exist, where there are consequences for unfinished business, and where even the dead are not immune to the detrimental effects of unchecked capitalism. In increasingly silly and wry detail, Boonbunchachoke shows us how even apparitions are forced to deal with bureaucratic red tape and the expectation of financial solvency.

Even though everyone can acknowledge Nat’s spirit lives on, no one is prepared to let March continue a relationship with a vacuum cleaner (though he does try, repeatedly, to have sex with it in private). That is, until Suman’s overbearing parents, all clad in matching colors, realize that they can use one ghost to oust another. The temptation of money is too great to ignore. Same thing happened for March’s brother, who is gay. They were upset about his sexuality until they realized he could connect the family to the Australian market via his husband.

As March and Nat try to carve out some semblance of normalcy, it becomes all together too clear that doing so can only come at the expense of other people’s happiness and safety. A Useful Ghost asks us to consider what utility collective memory holds, and whether leaning into the past can have consequences for the future. More importantly, Boonbunchachoke, who also wrote the screenplay, implicitly argues that our financial institutions are carelessly tossing away our shared experience for the cheap thrill of a buck.

With colors as rich and as deep as the early cinema of Pedro Almodóvar, A Useful Ghost is one of the most visually resplendent films of the last few years, and it delights us in it at the same time that it questions why we are so tempted by everything that is new. In the film’s opening moments, as a gorgeously carved fresco is callously tossed aside for the construction of a new apartment complex, Boonbunchachoke makes his point clear: that life, memory, and even cleaning by hand are all worth it, precisely because of its labor. Because they came from someone’s thoughts and dreams. Anything else is just plastic.

A Useful Ghost opens theatrically on January 16th, 2026.