A Delightful Supernatural Thai Sex Comedy

Unlike the logic-defying supernatural phenomena that drive its plot forward, Thai feature A Useful Ghost (Phi Chidi Kha) should not work, with its jarring shifts in tone and cray-cray mix of genres — and yet it does. Writer-director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s feature debut, which premiered in the Critics’ Week sidebar at Cannes, writes its own rule book.

It starts off farcically with household and industrial appliances possessed by dead spirits seeking their still-living loved ones; morphs into nesting sets of surprisingly sincere love stories, some of them lustily queer; and ends with the dawn of a violent class war spanning both spiritual and earthly planes. Boonbunchachoke’s skillful toggling between comedy, melodrama and polemic helped to spark interest on the Croisette where camp Thai content goes over well. A long afterlife on the festival circuit awaits.

For all its playfulness, there’s an intellectual heft to A Useful Ghost that exerts its own gravity. It’s no surprise that in the film’s press notes Boonbunchachoke’s bio reveals that, in addition to making his own shorts and writing for commercials and television in Thailand, he also teaches film theory and writes film criticism.

That makes it tempting to see “Academic Ladyboy” (Wisarut Homhuan), the first character we get to know, with his apartment full of books and fascination with stories, as a version of the director himself. Turns out he owns a fragment of a municipal bas-relief panel that features in a digressive opening prologue. The panel depicts iconic Thai types — Buddhist monks, soldiers, farmers and so on — and gets taken down to make room for a new shopping mall, a narrative trajectory that echoes the discourse throughout about the erasure of history and the fragility of memory.

Academic Ladyboy (that’s also his name in the credits) is the auditor to whom the stories within the film’s story are told after he calls a technical support line to complain about his new vacuum cleaner audibly coughing in a very human way through the night. Practically moments later, eerily beautiful bleach-blond repairman Krong (Wanlop Rungkumjad) shows up on Ladyboy’s door to examine the appliance. Krong is not surprised that the vacuum is possessed as it’s a recurrent fault of products from the factory that made it. To explain, he tells the interconnected stories of two ghosts with deep connections to the plant.

The first ghost is the spirit of a worker named Tok (Krittin Thongmai), who dies under somewhat mysterious circumstances and then takes up residence in the facility’s dust extractors, air conditioners and vacuums that are made there. In the story’s world, ghosts come back because they have unfinished business, but also because someone living remembers them well enough to keep them around. Later, it will be revealed that Tok’s male lover Pin (Wachara Kanha) is still pining for his beloved. When no one else is around Pin and Tok — in human form, not machine — will have vigorous shagging sessions.

Meanwhile, another ghost and her still-breathing object of affection take the story’s central stage. March (Wisarut Himmarat) deeply mourns his late wife Nat (a regal Davika Hoorne). As the son of the factory’s female owner Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon), March often visits the premises, so he’s alarmed to see Nat’s ghost, wearing a very striking sapphire-blue silk dress with massive Claude Montana-style sculptural shoulders, walking among the production lines.

He chases her down but she’s moved into a new vacuum, a fetchingly designed product that seems to be bowing forward in supplication to its owner and comes with a handle embedded with LED lights to reveal what the vacuum is feeling. For instance, when March and Nat-in-vacuum-form make out in hospital, the lights glow red and pink, but turn blue when she’s just scooting around hallways. Those looking on at the lovers see March and the vacuum, the suction end standing in for Nat’s head, logically enough. But for March, he sees his wife, always in her starched, oddly formal blue dress. (Phim Umari’s costumes are striking throughout.)

Although Suman and March’s many paternal aunts and uncles disapprove of his current relationship with his dead spouse — most of them having disdained her as an unworthy match when she was alive — she soon finds a way to court the living’s favor. Using some kind of psychic power, she enters the dreams of people haunted by ghosts and unpicks why they won’t leave the living alone, which is where her story intersects with that of Pin and Tok. Unfortunately, sinister governmental minister Dr. Paul (Gandhi Wasuvitchayagit) employs Nat to take her skill further in order to wipe out people’s memories of the 2010 political uprising in Thailand, assisted by the use of electro-shock therapy.

The ghosts realize that their living loved ones have been compelled to forget them because the ghosts’ bodies start to become translucent, creating a sense of urgency that heats up the film as it enters its last act. The stakes are high even for Ishmael-like narrator Krong, whose true nature is finally revealed, a disclosure unlikely to surprise anyone — although it’s a bit of shock for poor Ladyboy, left at a crucial comic moment with his legs in the air in the middle of a bout of coitus.

But that’s typical of the surprising, often delightful way Boonbunchachoke bounces between comic and tragic registers, deftly interspersing bawdy low comedy with elegiac meditations on politics and history. Although the references to the 2010 uprising will be less resonant to non-Thai audiences — just as they’re less likely to catch the plot’s reference to the Thai legend of Mae Nak, who has featured in many films and TV shows — the themes of grief and memory are universal enough to give this legs for export.