At Cannes this year, the applause was not just loud – it was seismic. A Useful Ghost, the feature debut by Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, emerged from the Critics’ Week sidebar with the Grand Prize AMI Paris in hand. It’s the sort of win that quietly shifts things. Not only for the filmmaker, or for 185 Films, the Thai production house behind it, but for an entire region still largely overlooked in the palmares of European festivals. Only once before has an ASEAN film claimed this prize – Malaysia’s Tiger Stripes in 2023 – which makes A Useful Ghost the second, and possibly the strangest.
The story opens with March, grieving the sudden death of his wife, Nat, who succumbed to dust pollution. Soon, he discovers her spirit has returned – in the body of a vacuum cleaner. As he navigates this surreal reunion, his mother’s factory is beset by another ghost, this time a disgruntled labourer who brings operations to a halt. The family, already unsettled, rejects Nat’s lingering presence. But she, determined and oddly practical, offers to exorcise the workplace in exchange for being acknowledged – not just as a ghost, but as a partner. It’s part satire, part seance, and entirely sincere in its portrayal of loss and cohabitation.
Critics’ Week, dedicated to first and second-time directors, has always been where oddball gems surface. Yet Thai cinema’s presence here has been sporadic. It’s been a decade since Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour was selected. That absence has made Boonbunchachoke’s entry feel not only like a revival, but a gentle rebellion – one that pairs the domestic with the spectral, the absurd with the intimate, and still walks away with one of the section’s top honours.
For Thai audiences, and indeed Southeast Asian ones, this win is more than a trophy – it’s a quiet reclamation. At a festival often preoccupied with Euro-American prestige, A Useful Ghost serves as a reminder that our stories, however eccentric or dust-choked, carry weight. Boonbunchachoke’s film doesn't pander or explain – it simply arrives, with all its cultural specificity intact, and dares to be taken seriously. It is a ghost story, yes, but also a love letter to what Thai cinema has long done best: blending the surreal with the political, the personal with the haunted, without ever losing its sense of humour or its soul.