A Useful Ghost      Director: Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke Cert: NoneGenre: ComedyStarring: Davika Hoorne, Witsarut Himmarat, Apasiri Nitibhon, Wanlop Rungkumjud, Wisarut Homhuan Running Time: 2 hrs 10 minsDeath is only the beginning in Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s audacious debut, a supernatural comedy that masks one of the year’s thorniest political satires with an absurd premise.Strap in. A beautiful and tragic young bride, Nat (Davika Hoorne), dies and returns as a vacuum cleaner, hoping to reunite with her devastated husband. She finds herself navigating the anxieties of his affluent family, whose fortunes, and consciences, are already haunted by miffed poltergeists. Her in-laws looked down on her low-born dialect while she was alive. Death only exacerbates their snobbery.What begins as deadpan class comedy steadily unfolds into an allegory about memory, power and complicity in modern Thailand. The film links personal mourning with national amnesia, suggesting that societies, like families, conveniently decide which ghosts deserve remembrance and which must be erased from history.Factory accidents, political violence and military repression linger as malevolent presences – this is a film of many ghosts – while the machinery of business and government works to domesticate, neutralise or silence them. Nat herself becomes a compromised paradox: a spirit valued for going against her own kind to please her in-laws and a corrupt government official: an otherworldly class traitor.Boonbunchachoke juggles tones and ideas with remarkable sure-footedness. With the ease of a high-concept 1980s box-office smash, the film glides between fantasy, romance, horror and farce without losing emotional coherence.The careful compositions of Pasit Tandaechanurat’s cinematography and Chonlasit Upanigkit’s crisp editing fashion a world that is simultaneously fun and unsettling, where eroticism, grief, slapstick and talking kitchen appliances coexist. The result recalls the metaphysical cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul while finding an entirely original comic register.The performances anchor the film’s increasingly surreal turns, especially that of Davika Hoorne, whose presence remains affecting even when she’s metallically enunciating as a vacuum cleaner. A deserving winner of the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at Cannes, A Useful Ghost announces Boonbunchachoke as a film-maker of extravagant imagination.On Mubi from Friday, July 24th