At MIFF 2025, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke had the audience laughing before his directorial debut A Useful Ghost even began. He jokingly suggested that the film would be better enjoyed without any expectations. It was a playful overture and one that set the tone for what followed—a work that lures you in with deadpan wit, then unsettles you with what lingers beneath.

At its core, A Useful Ghost is exactly what its title implies: a ghost story. But in Boonbunchachoke’s hands, ghosts appear not as terrors but as neighbours, intertwined into the rhythms of Thai daily life. Rooted in the country’s long tradition of spectral folklore, the film treats spirits with casual familiarity, collapsing the boundaries between the living and the dead. That offhand tone, however, downplays the gravity of what the ghosts actually carry. The ghosts here aren’t cheap scares—they are histories knocking at the door.

The film begins with the self-proclaimed “Academic Ladyboy” (Wisarut Homhuan) declaring, “Mere particles of dust in the air changed my ladyboy life forever.” It’s a perfectly absurd line and an omen of things to come: a sneeze, a vacuum cleaner and the uncanny discovery that it coughs up the very dust it collects. A repairman soon arrives (though not quite the one you’d expect), spinning tales of the factory where the machine was made. From there, the narrative shifts toward March (Witsarut Himmarat), the son of a ruthless factory owner, whose wife, Nat (Davika Hoorne), dies from dust pollution. Her spirit returns through another vacuum and what follows is a romance between man and machine—by turns tender and surreal—it is played with such sincerity that it rattles March’s family more than the absurdity itself.

The repairman’s stories also pull the factory’s ghosts back into view, where its neglect and lost lives hang in the air like dust—everywhere, unavoidable and refusing to clear. What might sound like a farce sharpens into allegory: the vacuum is no longer just a prop in an offbeat romance but a vessel for everything capitalism discards: from exploited labourers to the memories it would rather erase. Dust becomes the residue of history, coating every frame with what industry and power would prefer we forget.

This is what makes A Useful Ghost so striking. Its impressive capability to balance comedy and critique without ever losing sight of either. Boonbunchachoke’s style keeps the humour bone-dry, yet beneath the laughs lies a furious insistence on memory—on the idea that the past must be carried forward, whether through folklore, grief, or the stubborn persistence of dust. The film becomes queer, ecological and anti-capitalist all at once, not through overt statements, but in the way it insists on connection: between bodies and machines, between private mourning and collective injustice, and between the absurd and the deadly serious.

And despite all its thematic ambition, the film remains anchored in its tactile craft: performance and aesthetic. Boonbunchachoke frames each scene with uncanny precision, the cinematography lingering on textures of dust, fabric, and machinery so that absurdity never drifts into parody but sharpens into resonance. What struck me most at MIFF was how the audience seemed conducted by the film itself, bursts of laughter yielding to sudden stillness, the collective mood oscillating on cue. That tension gives the work its charge, with comedy and critique colliding in real time and making it impossible to dismiss the ghosts as either joke or metaphor alone. Just as crucial are the performances. Apasiri Nitibhon, as the unyielding mother-in-law, delivers the standout turn, her stone-faced gravity both grounding the chaos and propelling the story forward. Around her, the ensemble sustains a deadpan conviction that allows humour and grief to emerge organically, without ever breaking the film’s delicate composure.

For a debut, it feels astonishingly assured. Funny, inventive, and visually entrancing, A Useful Ghost doesn’t just stretch the ghost story—it reclaims it as a space for reckoning and renewal. In a moment when histories of labour, grief and environmental collapse are too easily brushed aside, Boonbunchachoke insists—through laughter, love and dust—that we remember what refuses to disappear. The result is a film that laughs, mourns, and unsettles all at once, proving that cinema remains one of the most vital tools we have for keeping history alive.