A scene from ‘The Helpful Ghost’
A Ghost Haunted Vacuum Cleaner is the kind of one-liner that can pull in festival audiences looking for a bit of lighthearted entertainment to fill the time slots between “heavier” films that demand much more attention. The Helpful Ghost, Thai filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s debut feature screened in the world cinema category at the 30th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), even features in the opening hour. Until the film becomes something more, with strong undercurrents of contemporary Thai political history. A person who has just bought a new vacuum cleaner is woken up at night by the loud coughing of the machine. As it turns out, the vacuum cleaner is haunted by a factory worker who died on the job. The loud coughing is his expression of anger towards the vacuum cleaner company he believes caused his death. It’s not the only haunted vacuum cleaner in town. The company owner’s son seems to be in love with a vacuum cleaner owned by Nat, his dead wife. All of this is fodder for a lot of the humor that punctuates the opening half of the film. In a way, this treatment also lulls the viewer into thinking that the love story between man and machine may be intended as a backdrop for the creator’s view of air pollution caused by the constant stream of development projects. That is until we learn about the existence of “helpful” spirits and inconvenient spirits. Nat, now considered a helpful spirit, is approached by the political and military establishment to read the dreams of inconvenient spirits who have haunted political leaders due to past atrocities. The film reveals its contemporary context at this point, when we realize that the uncomfortable ghosts are those of the “Red Shirt” protesters who faced intense repression by the Thai military in 2010. According to reports at the time, about 90 mostly unarmed civilians protesting demands for early elections were killed in the crackdown, while thousands were injured. The military intervention was also accompanied by the closure of media that supported the protesters. Boonbunchachoke’s film, which interweaves several genres in the service of a sweeping theme, expects the viewer to submit to its internal logic. This includes not only ghosts possessing machines, but also the ability to read the dreams of others, as well as ghosts disappearing when their memory is erased from the minds of the living. The latter option is at the heart of the film’s powerful message, memory’s struggle against oblivion, keeping even recent historical memories alive as they are erased and rewritten in real time. The screenwriter puts quite a few elements into it, which makes the film a bit clumsy and meandering at times. It also tries a little too hard to drive home the point where a final reveal of the underlying theme could have done the job much more effectively. Still, the film stands out for its ingenuity in using a humorous ghost story to cover what is difficult to tell. The film is Thailand’s official entry into the Best International Feature Film category at the Academy Awards this year.
Published – 17 Dec 2025 20:13 IST
