Start the week with a film: In ‘A Useful Ghost’, a love that outlives death and forgetting

There’s a ghost in the machine – literally. Although Nat has died from a respiratory illness, her spirit has occupied a vacuum cleaner manufactured by her mother-in-law Suman’s company. Nat’s husband March is elated. Everyone else sees an appliance, but all he sees is his dead wife.

There’s more to A Useful Ghost than a simple, quirky haunting. In Thai director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s feature debut, a love that refuses to die doubles up as a metaphor for his country’s denial of its brutal past.

A Useful Ghost, which is out on Mubi, won the top award in the Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week section in 2025. The film is in the arthouse tradition, exploring its themes through a highly formal aesthetic that includes stillness, frontal compositions and deadpan humour.

The story of Nat (Davika Hoorne), March (Witsarut Himmarat) and March’s mother Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon) is told through a flashback. Reeling from dust generated by construction projects, a man buys a vacuum cleaner that turns out to be haunted. It isn’t the only one that has rolled out from Suman’s factory, the repairman Krong explains.

Spirits are floating among the workers, Nat being one of them. Nat has taken up home in a crimson vacuum cleaner that follows the grieving March wherever...

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