‘A Useful Ghost’ review: A haunted vacuum cleaner collides with Thailand’s recent past

Dir/scr: Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke. Thailand/France/Singapore. 2025. 130 minutes.

If Yorgos Lanthimos relocated to Thailand his subsequent movie may look one thing like critic, trainer, author and director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s A Helpful Ghost, a deadpan comedy-drama ghost romance about grief, reconnection, social boundaries and the sins of 1’s previous. Making its world premiere throughout Critics’ Week at Cannes, A Helpful Ghost tells the absurdly joke of a grieving husband reuniting together with his deceased spouse on a supernatural and digital stage earlier than taking a extra critical detour into an exploration of nationwide guilt and trauma. Ratchapoom’s function debut is a visually formidable and thematically layered large swing that’s as polarising as it’s inventive.

An enormous swing that’s as polarising as it’s inventive

A Helpful Ghost is sort of actually headed for a protracted life on the competition circuit in Asia Pacific the place star Davika Hoorne has a strong fan base and continues to be recognised for her function in Thailand’s highest grossing movie ever, 2013’s Pee Mak. The movie also needs to discover traction with artwork home distributors within the area in addition to the very choose European and North American markets who’ve loved the formally-challenging Thai giants resembling Pen-ek Ratanaruang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul up to now.

Recognised for making waves at Locarno with Crimson Aninsri; Or, Tiptoeing On The Nonetheless Trembling Berlin Wall in 2020, a couple of transgender spy undercover as a cis man making an attempt to get near a political activist, Ratchapoom wades into related star-crossed lover territory, this time lacing it with political grace notes. Intentionally paced (it might bear shedding a couple of minutes from its languid runtime) and infrequently mesmerising for its quiet tone, A Helpful Ghost is assured in its storytelling and additional marks Ratchapoom as a filmmaker to observe.

The motion begins in Bangkok, with self-declared Tutorial Ladyboy (Wisarut Homhuan) coping with mud air pollution that’s inflicting widespread respiratory issues. He buys a high-powered vacuum cleaner to get his house workplace underneath management, which he quickly discovers is haunted. The good-looking and mysterious Krong (Wanlop Rungkumjad) arrives to service the equipment, however winds up sitting with Ladyboy all day, relating tales concerning the manufacturing facility the machine got here from.

The house home equipment producer is a household enterprise run by Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon), and her youngest son March (Wisarut Himmarat). March is grieving the loss of life of his pregnant spouse, Nat (Davika), whose ghost has possessed one other vacuum mannequin. Krong explains the equipment possessions started when a employee handed away, believing the manufacturing facility was negligent in defending its employees. The injury the ghosts are doing to the enterprise makes March’s household proof against accepting Nat’s spectral reincarnationwhen it occurs, however the couple’s reunion lastly wins everybody’s favour when she vanquishes the extra disruptive spirits and placing the manufacturing facility on the street to restoration.

However when highly effective authorities minister Dr Paul (Gandhi Wasuvitchayagit) asks for Nat’s assist with banishing his personal ghosts, it results in an ethical dilemma for the human-ghost couple.

A Helpful Ghost teems with absurdist humour that the solid performs solely straight and which Ratchapoom directs with out self-conscious winking. Nat’s debate as a vacuum with a nurse over visiting hours spirals into an incredible little bit of sketch comedy; the sting of the browbeating Suman takes from her household about her failures as a mom stays, even when it’s softened by some hilariously on-the-nose dialogue; it’s exhausting to infuse pressure into fisticuffs between a vacuum and fridge.

The oddball humour lends the movie its candy and barely tragic romantic undercurrents, but Ratchapoom steadily seeds the script with simply sufficient allusions to different ghosts whose rage is dominating. Lots of these have been impacted by Dr Paul and his cohorts in Thailand’s 2010 Crimson Shirt protests, violently put down by the army in mid-Might of that 12 months, and in the end they add a low-key condemnation of a robust, privileged class that may slightly erase the previous than reckon with it. 

In Ratchapoom’s world, that reckoning will probably be a gonzo one set to a discordantly chipper rating by Chaibovon Seelookwar, complemented by Rasiguet Sookkarn’s (Ten Years Thailand), stark and sterile manufacturing facility and hospital manufacturing design, and cinematographer Pasit Tandaechanurat’s lushly-captured pure environment, the place the starkness feels welcoming, and a little bit melancholy.