Grief and ghosts aren’t new territory for any national cinema, but this is perhaps particularly true of Thailand. But “A Useful Ghost” is an entertaining and moving – if also somewhat sprawling – fable of love and loss that isn’t quite like anything you’ve seen before. The action in the Cannes Critics’ Week selection starts when a self-declared “Academic Ladyboy” (Wisarut Homhuan) buys a vacuum cleaner, only to discover that the appliance appears to be possessed. A hot repair guy (Wanlop Rungkumjud) then shows up, but this isn’t a porno (though stay tuned, because there’s a sex scene between the two whose climax is both sad and funny in equal measure). He’s there to introduce the main narrative: the tragic tale of the widower March (Witsarut Himmarat) lost in grief for his wife who has recently died of dust poisoning. It becomes apparent that the spouse is still very much present, albeit reincarnated in the form of a possessed vacuum cleaner.
From “Vertigo” to “Birth,” the idea of loved ones returning to us in strange circumstances is a powerful cinematic motif. “A Useful Ghost” marks one of the more esoteric entries in that canon. Part of the fun of the film is in seeing how other people react to the fact that March is keen to rekindle his bond with his wife, regardless of her new status as electrical appliance. Some of the film’s best comedy is mined from the fact that it’s less that she’s a vacuum cleaner and more that she’s returned at all that provokes the ire of March’s family. Apparently, they never thought much of her when she was alive and her ability to transcend the limits of death and the hereafter hasn’t helped endear her to the in-laws one iota.
Where the film gets a little chewier, moving out of enjoyable novelty into something deeper, is in using this context to explore the dynamics of appeasing an oppressor. Rather than rebel against the family who treat her so poorly, Vacuum Nat attempts to placate them by proving herself “a useful ghost”: she will help them exorcise similarly displaced spirits from their factories, where unsafe working conditions have killed others who have later come back as appliances too. This collaboration with the oppressor, rather than solidarity with the oppressed, makes Nat a complicated heroine. But because she is so low down the pecking order — being both dead and a vacuum cleaner — you have plenty of sympathy for her plight.
This all works because there’s something oddly refined about the vacuum cleaner’s performance, despite the inherently comic premise. You might expect the comedy here to come from a clunky little machine reversing into things and bumping about like a cute robot in an ’80s movie. Or perhaps a haunted vacuum cleaner would be a sinister thing, imbued with menace in the style of the Plymouth Fury in John Carpenter’s “Christine” or the innumerable porcelain dolls in Blumhouse horror movies? One could so easily imagine the hose glinting, serpentine, filled with evil intent. Instead, there’s something dignified and elegant about the vacuum, as it steadily glides about with a strange vulnerability. It’s an unexpected and delicious choice, echoing the elegant physicality of the actor Davika Hoorne, who portrays the haunted hoover’s human self.
When a bunch of monks show up to call the vacuum cleaner “a cunt”, it’s both funny and oddly outrageous, calling on the viewer’s protective instinct — an involving approach that would be out of place in the similarly absurdist but more nihilistic work of someone like Quentin Dupieux (a filmmaker who has also discovered the cinematic possibilities of animating the inanimate, albeit to wholly different effect). Boonbunchachoke is more compassionate, and he needs to be for the political project here to ring true: the aim is to draw attention to Thailand’s track record when it comes to disposable workers and politically expedient cover ups.
A more commercial film could have allowed for a “haunted vacuum cleaner set to clean up” headline. Alas, being honest, the box office prospects for this one seem destined for an arthouse audience, though its offbeat charm is winning, as is its successful transition into melancholy mode, shot through with a distinctive sense of the macabre.
