A spectre is haunting Thailand

The ghost is always an image that insists on making itself present. In The Sixth Sense (1999), or even in Ghost (1990), for example, what prevented the eternal rest of the deceased were the matters they had not resolved in life. The ghost has a debt and cannot rest until it has paid it off: the extension of work beyond death. For the Thai Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, the reasons that mobilize spirits could be summarized in two: revenge and love, although the only thing that makes their existence possible is the memory that the living have of the dead.

The ghosts in A Useful Ghost are those that do not disappear as long as someone remembers them, and this is how their existence becomes both a social and political act of resistance. Nat appears to March reincarnated as a vacuum cleaner, continuing a human-appliance love story worthy of Quentin Dupieux's plots, as part of a narrative that contains multiple underlying layers of issues such as grief, individual memory, and collective memory. It all begins with the dust raised by the fracture of a stone mural when it was moved for the inauguration of a shopping center: hence also the ghost as a footprint of history, and cinema, traversing the traumas of Thailand and genres (from comedy to horror) like a specter, like that which resists.