Useful ghost: unclassifiable and brilliantly barred (critic)
Grand Prix of the Critics’ Week, this first Thai long Thai shaken around a haunted vacuum cleaner proves to be a great and unexpected political film.
We owe to Thai Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke the most barred pitch in DE Cannes 2025, which he left with the Grand Prix of the Critics’ Week. The story of March, a man broken by the death of his wife Nat, victim of dust pollution, who discovers that the spirit of it … reincarnated in their vacuum cleaner! A starting situation that the filmmaker will push to the end by refusing the ease of limiting himself to a pure film-concept. Since barely reconstituted, this funny couple will confront the March’s family, reluctant to this supernatural relationship because it is even haunted by a ghost, which appeared on the death of a worker who caused the closure of their factory. And that, to prove its usefulness, Nat undertakes to clean this factory and release it from her wandering souls.
Useful ghost then rocks comedy to a political film through the will of this family to eradicate the memory of workers abused by their care. This fable with chiseled writing and elegant staging puts its stripping humor in the service of a real pamphlet against an Orwellian society dominated by the surveillance and repression where the resistance of those who do not want to be erased echoes the demonstrations brutally repressed by the Thai power in 1976 and in 2010. And speaking of his country, this lover Ruiz signs a completely universal film whose final as macabre as liberating celebrates the ability of this work to resist any confinement in a particular genre.
Of RATCHAPOM BOONBUNCHACHOKE. With Mai Davika Hoorne, Witsarut Himmarat, Apasiri Nitibhon … Duration 2h10. Release on August 27, 2025
