A Useful Ghost

This Thai debut announces a genuinely distinctive filmmaking voice, blending comedy, horror, and melodrama with a control of tone that critics singled out as remarkable for a first feature. The absurd premise — a grieving widower reunited with his wife's spirit after she possesses a vacuum cleaner — is played with total sincerity, and reviewers praised how the film earns real emotion from material that could easily have stayed a gimmick. Performances and visual craft draw consistent praise, with striking, painterly compositions that several critics called some of the most memorable images of the festival circuit this year.

Where opinions diverge is pacing and structure in the back half. Most critics found the film's momentum, so confidently built early on, gets diluted by a second half that shifts tone and piles on additional narrative threads — framing devices, dream sequences, and genre digressions that some felt spread the film thin rather than deepening it. A number of reviews suggested the film runs longer than its ideas strictly need, though this is presented as a shared reservation rather than a dividing line — nearly everyone who raises it still calls the overall experience worthwhile.

Thematically, the film uses its ghost story as an extended allegory — for grief and memory, for labor and economic precarity, and for the experience of being treated as less than fully human by family and institutions. Critics were largely aligned in reading these layers as the film's real strength, elevating the premise well past its novelty.