By Yun-hua Chen.
I think it comes down to absurdity. I’m not sure it’s exactly a genre, but ‘absurd’ feels closest.”
Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke
The combination of the seemingly contradictory concepts in the title, useful and ghost, is the film’s most ingenious device. What happens when a ghost obsesses a vacume cleaner and, with all the best of intentions, tries to be useful? How far can the value of a ghost be capitalised in an inherently utilitarian society? Can the ghosts of suppressed historical trauma be forcefully cleansed from the memories of the living? A Useful Ghost’s sci-fi horror backdrop is absurd, bonechilling, alarmingly lifelike and hilarious in equal measuures, its social critique subtly wrapped in a singular mix-genre framework and carried by a glossy all-star cast led by the heartthrob Davika Hoorne. It begins with queer stories as the basis of the frame narrative and evolves into familiar family drama within a wealthy household, before delving into a complex web in which individual stories are intertwined with polluted air, political intrigue, power games on both individual and collective levels, and the forceful erasure of collective memory.
In the context of the Viennale 2025, Film International had the chance to talk with the director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke about his filmmaking and this human-ghost universe.
It’s a unique film that cleverly uses genre conventions while blending in entirely new elements. I was wondering how you developed the script at the very beginning. Were all the elements already in your head from the start, or did the story grow organically, with one idea leading to another?
It was definitely the latter: one thing led to another.
Initially, I started with a treatment. It was quite straightforward: a story about a female ghost and a human man who want to stay together, but whose family disapprove of the relationship and try to break them apart. That was the basic backbone of the story. As I worked on it, though, it became more and more detailed. In the first drafts, the ghost was not a possessed vacuum cleaner. She appeared in human form. The idea that ghosts could visit and inspect people’s dreams also came later. The framing device involving the ladyboy and the ghost-repairman came later as well; they were not in the first draft. At the beginning, it was only the story of Nat and March.
When I tried to write the screenplay, I completed three drafts and still couldn’t finish it. I felt something was missing, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what. Eventually, I realised that I needed a framing device. I like the artificiality of cinema. I like it when a film reminds the audience that they are being told a story, even though film itself is already a form of storytelling. I wanted to make that explicit within the film. So I felt I needed another set of characters who were telling this tale to others, while the audience witnesses that act of storytelling. Once I introduced that structure, everything became clearer. One of the film’s themes is how stories and memories are passed on. Storytelling itself, the transmission of memory, became central to the film. In that sense, the framing device became essential.
So, to answer your question: I didn’t have all these elements in my head from the beginning. I had a core event and a sequence of events, but the film expanded gradually as more details were added.
At times the story is so immersive that the audience forgets it is a frame narrative, and then when the frame reappears, we are reminded that this is a story being told.
Yes, exactly. I think it worked well because there are two worlds that gradually merge into one.
Did you watch the Taiwanese film Marry My Dead Body? It has a Thai remake.
Yes, I watched the Taiwanese original on Netflix last year, before the Thai remake was released in cinemas. I watched it for the same reason. I wanted to understand how they would adapt it. The blurring of the boundary between the living and the dead is very common in Asian cultures, but it isn’t always easily understood in the West.
How did you think about communicating this ghost-human world to international festival audiences?
I think it comes down to absurdity. I’m not sure it’s exactly a genre, but “absurd” feels closest. When I talk to sales agents about how to describe the film, we initially called it a dark comedy or a dark fantasy. But I think “absurd” might be the most accurate term, even though it’s not a label people usually use when communicating wth the audience about a film. Absurdity has roots in theatre, and I really enjoy it. I also feel that absurdity might resonate more with Western audiences, since there is already a strong tradition of absurdist storytelling there.
One scene that has stayed in the film since the very first draft is when the ghost encounters the nurse at the hospital. They argue about why she can’t visit her husband, and the nurse says visiting hours are over. That scene became part of the film’s DNA: ghosts encountering modern bureaucracy, being treated like ordinary citizens within this bureaucratic system. From there, I imagined ghosts dealing with nurses, hospital rules, police authority, and even family structures. I was interested in the absurdity of ghosts not being treated as frightening entities, but rather as something almost subhuman.
Ghosts were once human; they still look human, but they are no longer human. That subhuman status affects how they are and how they are treated by humans, especially by those in power.
Why a vacuum cleaner?
Practically speaking, a vacuum cleaner is easy to move and easy to use. Erotic appliances are difficult to shoot. A washing machine, for example, is too heavy and static. But the real reason is narrative. From the very first idea, Nat would die from dust pollution. Dust pollution is very real in Thailand. It predates the film. Every winter in Bangkok, the air becomes so polluted that you barely see blue sky, only white dust floating everywhere. It reminds me of Victorian London.
As I was writing, that reality became more serious and found its way into the story. If Nat died from dust pollution, it made perfect sense that she would possess a vacuum cleaner. Dust is something her husband still has to struggle with, so if she wants to help him, she cleans the house. That was my original idea.
There’s also something fascinating about a youthful ghost inhabiting an electronic device: objects designed to be useful. Ghosts themselves become commodified within capitalism. Also, ghosts were once human, but now they are subhuman. They cannot appear as humans anymore; they exist only in the form of electrical appliances. That’s a second level of dehumanisation. They are humanised insofar as they are ghosts, but simultaneously dehumanised because they no longer exist in human form. Instead, they inhabit objects. In that sense, they are reduced to the point of no longer being human at all, valued only for their usefulness, for the utility of the machine they occupy.
Your use of genre is fascinating. It’s a horror film where humans are more frightening than ghosts, and a melodrama where the mother-in-law archetype is reversed. Are you an avid genre viewer?
Honestly, I wasn’t consciously playing with genre. I’m not a big horror fan; I hate being scared in a cinema. It’s exhausting. Thailand makes a lot of horror films, especially ghost films, and I wanted to explore what ghosts could do if they didn’t have to scare people. When you remove them from their usual context, they become more human, or subhuman, as I mentioned earlier. So, I wasn’t trying to make a horror film, but rather a ghost film. Casper is also a ghost film, but it isn’t scary at all.
Melodrama, however, was something I consciously engaged with. Malay folklore figures are very prominent in Thai soap operas, so I played with that tradition.
How did you bring the cast together? The ensemble is very refreshing.
I owe a lot to my casting team. Davika was the first to come on board, and it was a happy coincidence. I participated in a Thailand-Tokyo workshop in 2021, mentored by Pek Ake Ratanaruang. He later directed the Netflix series 6ixtynin9, starring Davika. During that shoot, my producer met her, and she mentioned that she hadn’t acted in a feature film for nearly ten years and wanted something interesting, especially independent projects.nMy producer pitched A Useful Ghost to her, “It’s about a vacuum cleaner,” and she immediately said yes. Davika is a top-tier star in Thailand. She’s done everything in mainstream film and television, and she wanted a new challenge.
When I was writing, I never imagined her in the role – she was simply too famous. But her presence elevated the film. She brings with her the history of Thai cinema, including horror films she has previously starred in. After that, the rest of the cast was selected through a standard casting process, including film actors, TV actors, and even YouTubers with acting training.
Her performance is very subdued and restrained, quite different from her television work. How did you work together?
We rehearsed before shooting. We focused on finding Nat’s “default face” – what she looks like when she feels nothing. Emotional expression shouldn’t stray too far from that baseline. During shooting, I often asked Davika to minimise her expressions: less smiling, less front-facing emotion. She still expresses feeling, but through micro-expressions: lips, brows, tiny movements. It’s very subtle and very fresh.
In real life, she’s completely different: outspoken, warm, always smiling. I think she really enjoyed doing something new.
Her performance contrasts sharply with the costume – those exaggerated shoulder pads, for example. How did you work with the costume designer?
Ghosts belong to the past, but they return. Conceptually, they are out of time. Visually, I wanted them to be out of place as well. Nat’s costume draws from exaggerated 1980s office fashion. Her red hair and oversized blue dress make her stand out in every environment. All the ghosts in the film have unnatural hair colours, not because they dyed their hair before dying, but because they exist outside time.
The oversized costume also suggests burden – something heavy she has to carry. She looks like someone returning to work, still labouring even after death. One of the earliest images I had was of a ghost walking into an office building to work. That’s capitalism: even ghosts must be productive.
Architecture plays a major role in the film: the monument that collapses, the spiky marble structures. How did you find these locations?
Our location team was extraordinary. The film’s unreal tone allowed them to use places that rarely appear in cinema. The island in March’s dream, with the factory in the background, had been in their archive for years. They never found the right film for it until this one.
The spiky room actually exists. It’s a real laboratory in a Bangkok university used to test electromagnetic radiation in vehicles. I asked for “a laboratory,” and a week later they showed me that space. I had no idea such a place existed.
The film deals with memory, both personal and political, and with erasure as a tool of control…
I had the title before I finished the screenplay, so I needed to figure out how ghosts could be useful. In Thai culture, ghosts often give lottery numbers, but that isn’t cinematic. Dreams, however, are deeply personal spaces, filled with memories, desires, fears. I was inspired by Ismail Kadare’s novel The Palace of Dreams, about a fictional state that collects and analyses citizens’ dreams to identify potential traitors.
While writing in 2020, during political protests in Thailand, I was disturbed by how authorities confiscated phones and analysed private messages. It felt invasive and repulsive. So I thought: if ghosts are useful to power, they could monitor dreams, the most intimate space of all. The idea came together from many sources. It’s a collage.
Your dialogue is extraordinary, such as “the heterosexual ghost-human couple is reunited at the expense of a homosexual relationship.”
That line comes straight from Thai melodrama. The dialogue in Thai soap operas is exaggerated, sassy, operatic. No one speaks like that in real life, but I don’t want realism. I want heightened language. Modern audiences sometimes look down on melodrama, but I love it. I wanted dialogue that sounds like old Thai melodramas: bold, theatrical, unapologetically artificial.
Yun-hua Chen is an independent film scholar and critic and associate editor of Film International Online. Currently, she serves on the board of the German Film Critics Association.