Handy Ghost Review – The delightful black comedy summons the ghosts of Thailand’s past via a haunted hoover | film

HHere is the stylish and exhilarating feature debut from 39-year-old Thai director Ratchapoom Boonpunchchuk, who won the Critics’ Week Grand Prix at Cannes last year. It is a supernatural black comedy fantasy of national grief executed with passion and panache, about ghosts who refused to be confined to the afterlife after the country’s successive disasters: the bloody aftermath of the military crackdown in 2010, the coups d’état of 2006 and 2014, and before them, the Thammasat University demonstrations of 1976, along with their loved ones gone to their turbulent grave.

The Useful Ghost is honest and elegant in its compositional flair. The dream-like panels are vividly juxtaposed in the edit and the whole effect is unsettling, evocative and deeply sad. In some ways it is a humorous development of the serious spiritual truths depicted in the films of Thai master Joe Weerasethakul, such as Uncle Boonmee Who Can Remember His Past Lives and The Graveyard of Greatness. You may also feel the spectral shimmer of Western films like Ghost and Truly, Madly, Deeply.

Boonbunchachoke envisions a Thailand that forcefully erases and crushes its disturbing past. For example, the nearly removed frieze from the Democracy Monument in Bangkok in 1940, creating clouds of metaphorical toxic dust. An eccentric academic (Wissarot Homhwan), writing a paper on the iconography of this frieze, is surprised when his new vacuum cleaner starts spewing out dust he just inhaled. Repairman Krong (Wanlop Rongkumjad) arrives frighteningly quickly after his phone call to customer service, telling him that the problem is that the factory that made the vacuum is haunted… and we flash back to the strange story he had to tell.

A worker named Tok (Kritin Thongmai) haunts this factory as a poltergeist after he collapses on the shop floor due to ingesting toxic dust. The bad karma extends to the factory owner’s family: Nat (Davika Horn), the daughter-in-law of the owner’s widow Suman (Abasiri Nitibhun), dies in childbirth due to dust inhalation and returns to infest one of the factory’s vacuum cleaners; She comes back to life and tries to have sex with her grieving husband, March (Wissarut Heimarat), who is only too willing to make this consoling call. But Nat’s ghost is outmaneuvered by Suman and then government minister Dr Paul (Gandhi Wasovishayajit) to make herself useful to the state by invading the dreams of the workers who keep all sorts of commercially and politically inconvenient ghosts alive by remembering them.

Suman has to forget these undesirables again – she is the ghost in the machine of oppression, the ghost that the machine itself is trying to turn against all the other ghosts. And there is something deeply unsettling in the way Nat’s ghost can be “transformed” by exploiting her desire to have a child, even in her outsider state. Without the necessary written permission, her widower is told that he can use the eggs she has frozen for this purpose, and Nat’s ghost is presented with a gruesome “death day” gift at the minister’s luxuriously modern home. It is an intense film of flesh and blood.