Dust to dust: A love story about animated vacuum cleaners

Daniel Nelson

A Useful Ghost is almost certainly the strangest film you will see this year.

To convince you all I need say is that it’s about a dead woman whose spirt inhabits a vacuum cleaner.

She is not the only animated vacuum cleaner. 

Oh, it’s also about the victims of political repression in Thailand, and the power of loss and love.

Once you accept that ghosts are part of everyday life, whether in or out of machines, you sit back and follow the story, accepting that Nat is a ghost who wants to be useful and help clean up the factory owned by her husband’s family. She died from the factory’s deadly dust.

Once back as a ghost in the machine, it’s also natural that she can talk to the disapproving family (“The dead shouldn't mess with the living. You should join your next life”) and that she and March resume their sexual relationship.

But director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke is nothing if not ambitious, mixing in the complexities of ghostly behaviour and ghostly morality, including electric shock treatment to wipe out memory, and protesting students killed in 1976 and 2010 by security personnel.

Towards the end, however — which takes too long to arrive — the complexities thicken, anger grows about forgotten victims and the action accelerates, finally hitting fever pitch horror.

Much fun is had along the way. It’s a wonderfully quirky, entertaining, slightly mad film that doesn’t fit easily into any category box. As Boonbunchachoke has said, “I see my work as connected to both traditional Thai melodrama with its explosive, excessive dialogues, and to a still-unnamed movement sometimes called fantastic realism or fabulism.”

+ A week after seeing the film, I read that “Cambodia’s former leader has complained that Thailand is broadcasting ghost-like sounds across a disputed border” as part of psychological warfare.