A Useful Ghost, the debut feature from 39-year-old Thai film-maker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, is reviewed here as a stylish and confident supernatural black comedy that uses ghosts as a metaphor for Thailand's suppressed political history. The film, which won the critics' week grand prize at Cannes last year, channels national grief over events including the 1976 Thammasat University demonstrations, the 2006 and 2014 coups, and the 2010 military crackdown, giving voice to spirits who refuse to accept their erasure from official memory.

The plot centres on a haunted vacuum cleaner traced back to a factory where a worker died from poisonous dust and where the owner's daughter-in-law, Nat, also died in childbirth after inhaling the same dust; her ghost possesses an appliance and reconnects with her grieving husband. Government and family pressure then coerce Nat's spirit into serving the state by making politically inconvenient ghosts forgotten, exploiting her longing for a child in the process. The review praises the film's elegant visual style and comparisons to Apichatpong Weerasethakul's work and Western ghost romances, calling the result disquieting, erotic and deeply moving.