A Useful Ghost (Pee chai dai ka) at Queer East Festival, 20 May 2026
A Useful Ghost (Pee chai dai ka) opens with dust motes in the air, and then with a sequence showing costumed models (and a goat) lined up in a tableau vivant as a sculptor sketches them, and transforms their images into a panel depicting aspects of Thai life. The panel is unveiled in a square, but any permanence that the stone medium might imply is undermined as the panel is later taken away to make room for a shopping mall, and is damaged in the move. The next time we see it, much later in Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s debut feature, it is in fragments which decorate the inner walls of the home of the Parliamentary Minister Dr Paul (Gandhi Wasuvitchayagit). Here the memorials of Thailand’s history are brittle and transitory – yet also capable of being recycled and making a return, as well as finding embodiment in living, breathing people.
“Dust is a necessary evil,” says a news anchor on a television, “It’s not possible to have development without dust.” Sure enough those dust motes, stirred up during the construction of the new mall, are everywhere, leading an ‘Academic Ladyboy’ (Wisarut Homhuan) to purchase a vacuum cleaner for his apartment nearby. When the appliance coughs and wheezes and empties onto the floor the dust that it has collected, the Ladyboy calls for a repairman and is visited with uncannily astonishing speed by Krong (Wanlop Rungkumjad), who tells a seductive tale of a nearby factory haunted by worker Tok (Krittin Thongmai) who died of a respiratory disorder and then kept possessing various appliances to take vengeance against the factory’s manager Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon) and her late husband’s many, moneyed relatives. This story runs parallel to another, similar story in which Suman’s son March (Wisarut Himmarat), still grieving the death – also from a respiratory disorder – of his beloved wife Nat (Davika Hoorne), finds her returning in the form of a vacuum cleaner. Nat is the ‘useful ghost’ of the title, returned from the dead not for angry revenge like most other ghosts, but for love – and able not just to clean, but to enter the dreams of the living.
Their relationship, crossing the forbidden boundary between life and death, human and machine, may make A Useful Ghost a supernatural (and in the eyes of March’s elder kin, an unnatural) romance but it also comes with a political resonance. For the transgressive love between Nat and March mirrors the homosexual relationships (also expressly condemned by Suman’s in-laws) between March’s older brother Mos (Katanyu Swansri) and his Australian husband Ted (Dhyan Ho), between Tok and his factory co-worker Pin (Wachara Kanha), and also between the Ladyboy and Krong. Here sexual repression is a symptom of broader political repression, while sexual freedom represents a spirit of dissent, protest and rebellion.
Like the dust in the air, ghosts are fragments of the past, and they linger in the memories and dreams of the living. Nat, it turns out, is useful in cleaning away both dirt particles and memory – and her utility opens her to being manipulated and exploited by those who would like to purge themselves of their uncomfortable histories, so that they can sleep better at night in the absence of angry, noisy ghosts. Dr Paul and the VIPs from his circle are all haunted by the blood on their hands relating to their involvement in, for example, the 2010 military crackdown, the 1976 massacre, and war crimes in the Vietnam conflict, and and so Nat, to her own incomprehension and to March’s increasing horror, is recruited, weaponised even, to help identify and brainwash any citizen who remembers past wrongs, and to erase whole chapters of political tyranny and terror. Yet ghosts and crimes are not so easily eliminated, as long as there is someone to hear and to remember their stories, so that justice can eventually be served.
Co-written by Boonbunchachoke with Geoffrey Grison, A Useful Ghost proves as elusive and Protean as a phantom. For it is all at once a tragic love story, a political satire, a queer cri de coeur, and a sophisticated staging of memory’s importance. Ghosts are, after all, a useful device for amplifying both the buried sins of a nation, and the hope for an eventual return of the repressed – and this funny, surreal, haunting film calmly cleans through the ashes of Thailand’s questionable history for the dust that remains.
strap: Dust to dust: in Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s queer tragicomedy, a good revenant is exploited to clean away corporate and state crimes
© Anton Bitel
