'A Useful Ghost' review: Making out with a vacuum is the tip of the iceberg in this haunted comedy

Yes, in A Useful Ghost, there's a make-out scene between a man and a vacuum cleaner. Several actually. And none in the way you'd imagine. (Unless... were you immediately imagining nipple play?)

Admittedly, the image of a man cradling a vacuum in the movie's trailer is what put it toward the top of my must-sees out of the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. I value cinema that shows me something I've never seen before. And I assure you, this wild Thai comedy has a lot of things you've never seen before.

On the surface, it's the tale — well, tales — of ghosts who have possessed vacuum cleaners to reconnect to the people they've left behind. But incredibly, writer/director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke builds within this undeniably silly premise interwoven stories of love, yearning, and political rebellion.

Incredibly, he does all that in a way that makes just talking about this movie feel like recounting a fever dream. It's little wonder the film won the Critics' Week Grand Prix out of the Cannes Film Festival and has been chosen by Thailand as its submission to the Academy Awards for the international feature film category. It's a marvel.

A Useful Ghost is a rapturous Russian doll of a story.

Boonbunchachoke births one story from another from another. His film begins with a self-proclaimed "Academic Ladyboy" (Wisarut Homhuan), who buys a new vacuum to bust the dust coming in from a withering stone monument outside a humble apartment. Dust and vacuums will become a recurring element of each subsequent story, representing the persistent affliction of a paved-over past and the societal pressure to sweep it away instead of confronting it.

Buying a vacuum becomes a life-changing affair, because this ladyboy's new device is haunted — or so says the hot repairman named Krong (Wanlop Rungkumjud), who comes to fix it. With a smoldering gaze, he tells a tale of two other haunted vacuums. The first is of a vengeful spirit who afflicted a family-owned vacuum factory. The second is of that factory owner's son March (Wisarut Himmarat), who was so lost in grief over the death of his wife Nat (Davika Hoorne) that she was compelled to return — as a vacuum, painted as red as her dyed hair.

Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon), the factory owner, wasn't fond of Nat while she was alive. She's even less a fan now that Nat's a vacuum, sucking on March's nipples with her bristle attachment. A monk visiting the haunted factory notes that ghosts return because they remember and are remembered. Essentially, as a ghost is forgotten by the living, they fade into nothingness. So, Suman decides to electroshock the memories of Nat right out of March's head.

However, before Nat is fully faded, Suman's family learns that Nat has a unique skill for entering the dreams of the living. There, she can better understand the haunting ghosts of Thailand. And once this "useful ghost" has identified them, these unuseful ghosts can be extinguished by electroshocking their loved ones into forgetting them.

Listening to this story, the Academic Ladyboy is repulsed by Nat's willingness to turn on her own to maintain what she has. From there, Boonbunchachoke digs deeper into political allegory through a plotline involving a politician who wishes Nat to eradicate the ghosts of those killed in a political massacre. And just like that, this silly story has a powerful message that's achingly timely.

Kink and queerness come into play in A Useful Ghost.

In the opening line of Boonbunchachoke's film, he identifies the audience conduit as a LGBTQ+ person, the Academic Ladyboy, defined chiefly by his queerness and his intellectual curiosity. Later, when March's mother is being dressed down by her in-laws over her parenting, they scold her for raising her eldest gay and her second son to make out with a vacuum. This paired with a sprinkling of love scenes between March and vacuum Nat and several gay sex scenes suggests a throughline between these loves, deemed outside the norm of an older, conservative, and ruthless faction.

Queerness itself is celebrated in A Useful Ghost. The Academic Ladyboy is a compassionate listener to Krong's winding tale. Their connection is instant, sizzling, and satisfyingly resolved. Another subplot explores how homophobia in Thailand creates heartache and ghosts with unfinished business. Meanwhile, March's gay brother — though sneered at by his aunts and uncles — is shown only as joyful and loving with his husband and their son, though they discuss moving abroad to Australia.

Nat and March are straight, but once she's embodied in a vacuum, they no longer fall within the acceptable heterocentric norms of his family and a band of monks, who swarm her and call her a "thick cunt" while they attempt to banish her. In this way, Nat becomes subjected to hatred over who she loves because of the body she inhabits. And while this analogy might sound obvious, it plays out subtly because Boonbunchachoke's story is so surprising and strange, you may be focusing more on what the fuck is happening next while you watch, only to reflect on what it all means later. And I can't stop thinking about A Useful Ghost. Its outrageous jokes, earnest romance, and gnarly twists are unforgettable.

This film's collision of queerness, comedy, and politics should draw Boonbunchachoke comparisons to John Waters or Pedro Almodóvar. But the finale, which turns sharper and deliciously menacing, feels more in line with the political satires of Bong Joon Ho. With A Useful Ghost, Boonbunchachoke delivers a a delirious vision, a hilarious and thought-provoking comedy that demands to be seen and adored. It's just phenomenal.

A Useful Ghost was reviewed out of 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.