A USEFUL GHOST -- Thoughtful, Funny Spectral Comedy Evolves to Incisive Capitalist Critique

Review by Daniel Lima

The distinction between clinging to a memory best left forgotten, and willful ignorance of what should be a lesson learned, isn’t always clear. Too often, it’s the ignorant who are too quick to leave their actions in the past, and those that need to let go that carry on the burden longer than they ought to. The Thai film A Useful Ghost is a dry and dark examination of these two instincts, and while it never quite reconciles the two, it is never less than compelling, thoughtful, and often quite funny.

A man discovers that his newly purchased vacuum cleaner is haunted by a ghost. When the repairman diagnoses the haunting, he launches into the story of another poltergeist, a woman who dies while working at the factory her husband’s wealthy family owns. As her specter reconciles with her husband, his family seeks to drive them apart, as more and more hauntings begin to plague the bourgeois.

At first, it appears that the story is poised to settle for a simple dichotomy, conservatism vs. progressivism, but interrogating it further reveals fascinating nuances. The spirit of the wife at first inhabits an appliance, though only her husband can see her and not the thing she possesses, a blending of folkloric belief and modern convenience. The rekindled relationship between her and her husband could be interpreted as a kind of conservatism — even death will not keep the two apart — yet the family sees it as an abomination, resorting to traditional methods to end things that themselves are undermined by the two sides’ dueling interpretations of what is “traditional”.

Which is not to say that staring lovingly at a vacuum cleaner is within the boundaries of societal norms. There is an obvious tension between the happiness that the couple share with each other, and the ridiculousness of watching a man make out with an appliance. Is he not relegating himself to a life that never changes? How can he grow past the death of his wife if her apparition is constantly with him? If she is only hanging onto the mortal plane due to her love of her husband, how full an existence can she actually “live”? Does any of this matter if they’re happy?

As multifaceted as this central conflict is, A Useful Ghost remains a comedy, albeit a very restrained one. As zany as the premise sounds, the film is deliberately paced, with minimal camera movement, compositions that emphasize empty space, performances that are quite affectless, and long takes that drag out a scene. This approach emphasizes the absurdity of the situation, particularly in how matter-of-fact the entire situation is treated. It’s high praise that the film made me think of the work of Aki Kaurismäki.

Through the first half of the movie, there is something of an elephant in the room. The factory is being haunted by a different ghost, a man who had collapsed while working. The wife had died of a respiratory illness herself. While attempting to reunite with her husband, she makes friends with an influential man, who is able to return the favor purely based on his own class status. The man’s older brother has a husband, which the family did not approve of until that husband introduced the to business opportunities abroad. Clearly, there is a pragmatic limit to adhering to tradition. You just have to make yourself useful.

Where the first half of the film was mostly about one relationship that crossed the veil, probing the individual desire to never let go of what was, the second half supercedes those concerns with a neoliberal, capitalist critique. The ghosts evolve from a personal metaphor to a politically charged one, as all of the questions raised before are abandoned because the structural forces of the world today do not allow them to be asked. What was once pure but complicated becomes immediately co-opted by profit-driven machinations, and the question goes from, “When should we forget,” to, “Who should be forgetting?” Sometimes, the ghosts of the past tell stories that reveal something about our present, and should inform our future.

It’s a fascinating change, but not a dramatically satisfying one. There is a discontinuity between the two halves of A Useful Ghost that is hard to shake, particularly since in spite of the subdued performances of leads Davika Hoorne and Wittsarut Himmarat, their easy chemistry makes the romance work even without the thematic underpinnings. As broader ideas take center stage, their relationship loses narrative focus, and somewhere along the line the story stops being a romantic comedy altogether. Thematically appropriate, sure, but without that emotional foundation, the film’s conclusion leans more intellectually stimulating than profoundly moving or hilarious, where at first it was all three.

A Useful Ghost is now in theaters.

Rating: 4/5