‘A Useful Ghost’ Review: An Anti-Capitalist Ghost Story

For a ghost story, writer-director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s A Useful Ghost strikes a tone that’s removed from spooky. From the rating’s harp melodies to the deadpan performances, the serene flatness that pervades the movie couldn’t be higher suited to its hybrid of absurdist black humor, Buddhist cosmology, and Brechtian alienation impact. Because the glue holding collectively a fiddly plot, this unlikely temper is saved from monotony as a lot by its sheer incongruity with the style as by a mold-shattering ultimate sequence.

The gothic machine of nested tales does some heavy lifting in Boonbunchachoke’s feature-length directorial debut. The body story, set within the aftermath of the Thai navy crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 2010, follows a self-identified “tutorial ladyboy” (Wisarut Homhuan) as he buys a vacuum cleaner to take care of all of the mud filtering into his condo, generated by the demolition of a close-by metropolis sq. to make method for a shopping center. When the equipment’s unmistakably human coughing retains him awake at evening, he calls in a repairman (Wanlop Rungkumjad), who informs him that it’s the product of a haunted manufacturing unit.

This kicks off a narrative inside the story involving a slew of haunted commodities, together with one other vacuum cleaner possessed by Nat (Davika Hoorne), the useless spouse of March (Wisarut Himmarat), whose mom, Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon), owns the manufacturing unit in query. March’s refusal to overlook Nat despite electroshock remedy grants her a novel permanence, which Suman—and, afterward, the prime minister—exploits as a way to infiltrate manufacturing unit employees’ goals. As a consequence, outer and inside narratives start to merge.

Boonbunchachoke takes magical realism to a degree the place the characters aren’t solely unfazed by magic, their reactions to only about all the pieces are muted. The Kaurismäkian performing, no mere affectation, reveals how capitalism strips individuals of company whereas conferring it on commodities. Hoorne particularly stands out for the expressiveness she wrings out of microexpression. These uncommon moments the place emotion breaks via, as in a shot the place she slowly fades away whereas gazing at a husband who’s lastly forgetting her, are that rather more poignant in consequence.

Whereas A Useful Ghost succeeds in becoming two and even three movies’ price of plot into its 130-minute runtime, it makes for a considerably overstuffed, unfocused complete. The vanity of the haunted vacuum cleaner, for example, is deserted midway via. And whereas he takes the ghost story in recent, intriguing instructions, Boonbunchachoke appears too at pains to ship a political message that leaves little room for interpretation.

At instances, the movie comes throughout as a fictional encoding of hauntology and reification. Whereas there are exceptions, similar to a dream sequence wherein a employee assembles a double of himself, the symbolism is basically overt. Regardless of its radical sympathies, A Useful Ghost overexplains itself, undercutting its personal intent by treating us as passive receptacles of that means.

That stated, Boonbunchachoke’s protection of historic reminiscence couldn’t be extra well timed. These in energy, the filmmaker forcefully suggests, are all the time on the hunt for “good” ghosts, whom they will make “helpful” in directing consideration away from bloodbath and exploitation. Hauntings, paradoxically, can solely be dispelled by a continuous effort of bringing historical past, nonetheless traumatic, again to the floor. As A Useful Ghost’s long-deferred catharsis renders unmistakable, nothing wanting revolution can redeem the stressed useless.