A Useful Ghost

Bluesky

In Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s feature debut, ghosts aren’t ancient poltergeists who occasionally haunt a home appliance or two. They are spirits of those martyred by dust, neglect, and bullets alike, refusing to give in to their deaths, even if it means whirring through streets of Thailand as vacuum cleaners.

Elements of magical realism are almost seamlessly integrated in the story-within-a-story narrative as told by a mysterious maintenance technician Krong (Wanlop Rungkumjad). Answering a lonely young man’s (Wisarut Homhuan) service request about a new malfunctioning vacuum cleaner, Krong stays and fixes something else. As the narrative progresses, the two layers begin converging and absurdism abounds. The interplay between the third person perspective and the subjective camera affords these ghosts to “change” between appliances and humans without much signposting.

Boonbunchachoke’s queer dark comedy-drama consistently sidelines its gay characters to echo their marginalisation within the superficially accepting Thai society. Yet their encounter with isolation, non-acceptance, electroconvulsive therapy, while minute in screentime, has a far lasting effect compared to the (heterosexual) central arc, inspired by Thailand’s oldest ghost story.

Ingrained with the motif of dust, both in its literal sense as a pollutant and a cultural slang referring to someone insignificant and weak, A Useful Ghost’s cinematography creates visual susurrus, a sense that every particle of dust can not only be seen but heard and felt on one’s skin and in one’s respiratory system. The insignificant dust-people to vacuum cleaner-ghosts pipeline poetically highlights Thailand’s history of protest (Bloody May 2010 and the 6 October 1976 massacres are both referenced throughout).

The appliance-haunting ghosts are anchored to the memories and dreams of their loved ones, reinforcing the notion that we only exist as long as we are remembered. As an Orwellian government minister Dr Paul (Gandhi Wasuvitchayagit) spearheads an effort to exorcise the ghosts, they start fading to translucence while their loved ones are cruelly forced to forget them. Underwritten by a strong chromatic language, bureaucracy consumes its clerks, whose outfits match the colors of the counters they stand behind, effectively becoming one with them, while factory workers in navy blue uniforms find themselves at odds with bright yellow chairs they sit on during lunch.

The comic relief goes a long way to diffuse the intensity of the emotional gravity; it is hard not to at least chuckle at the bizarreness of a man making out with a vacuum cleaner. As the embedded story comes to its more or less inevitable outcome, the framing narrative becomes an ephemeral bittersweet romance with a cathartic end. Accompanied by the Russian avant-garde composer Sergey Kuryokhin’s The Tragedy in the Style of Minimalism, which is anything but minimalist, we get to shake off the excess absurdism while Boonbunchachoke makes it clear that the revolution will not be televised.

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