Ghosts are memories. Ghosts are the past intruding on the present. Ghosts are people that haven’t been or refuse to be forgotten. Those are just some of the thoughts that occurred during a late night screening of A USEFUL GHOST during the Milwaukee Film Festival.
I was expecting a good time based on a silly premise, a haunted vacuum cleaner, and I got that. What I was not expecting was a sneaky sucker punch that reveals that this is also a cry for justice.
A USEFUL GHOST is a 2025 Thai-French-Singapore-German co-production directed and written by Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke. It’s a first-time feature but shows no sign of growing pains. I’ll borrow the synopsis from the Milwaukee Film Festival’s program book. March (Daavika Hoorne) is mourning his wife Nat (Witsarut Himmarat) who has recently passed away due to dust pollution. He discovers her spirit has returned by possessing a vacuum cleaner.
That’s accurate enough, but leaves out that that is a story being told within the film. That story is being told by a vacuum repairman Krong (Wanlop Rungkumjad ) to a Thai “ladyboy” (Wisarut Homhuan) who is in the midst of preserving commemorative art in the process of being destroyed for commercial progress. Commercial progress which is killing the everyday people of the city with dust pollution. Especially the people of no importance to those in power.
Within that larger context, some of the movie’s theme spring to light. But, first I’m going to lead off with the fact that the film is damn funny. I’ve never seen a husband sucked off by a vacuum possessed by his late wife before, That kind of expresses some of the lunacy here including foul-mouthed priests and a dry deadpan reaction where possessed vacuums are seen as everyday occurrences.
Of course, hilarious comedies don’t tend to win the Grand Prix Prize at Cannes during Critics’ Week. Which should be the first clue that more is going on than meets the eye.
Some of that is in the title A USEFUL GHOST. Nat is seen as an annoyance by the remainder of the family who have things to do like run a factory that’s being haunted after a death of a worker. And later she’s recruited by the government to be sort of a ghostbuster that can peer into the dreams on the living and pinpoint whose memories are bringing back these ghosts. But she’s “useful” rather than seen as a person.
That’s where the true intentions and commentary is centered. The elites are determined to erase these inconvenient memories by any means necessary. These hauntings remind people of the sins of the past are frankly a problem for those in power who would rather their past sins be swept under the rug. And as Nat helps them it’s clear that she’s losing touch with her humanity and becoming something other than the memory that brought her back. What started out as a silly comedy becomes an actual horror film about the lengths that those in power will go to erase the past and accountability.
It’s pretty potent stuff smuggled in under the guise of a supernatural black comedy. That it was so deft at switching gears and getting to its ultimate point made the deeper meanings feel not as a betrayal of expectations, but a pleasant surprise. There are big things in the future of a writer-director that can pull this off. Don’t dismiss this one as a lark, it’s a surprisingly potent example of protest cinema that goes down smooth.
The 2026 Milwaukee Film Festival runs from April 16, 2026 until May 30, 2026. A USEFUL GHOST once more on Thursday, April 30, 2026 at 6:45 pm at the Downer Theatre. Tickets to A USEFUL GHOST and other upcoming films can be purchased at MKEFILM.ORG.
