Plug into ‘A Useful Ghost,’ a quirky, deep Cannes winner about a possessed vacuum

A possessed vacuum cleaner sparks a revolution in “A Useful Ghost,” a satire that’s “Brazil” by way of Bangkok. The Grand Prix winner of last year’s Cannes Critics Week, filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s snaky, surprising fable starts with a sneeze and explodes into a saga about bureaucracy, modernization and moral corruption. It’s electrifying.

A blogger (Wisarut Homhuan) is plagued by debris from a demolished memorial to Thailand’s students, workers and families. The construction site is erecting a shiny new mall while modern buildings and related respiratory illnesses are spiking up across the city. A government official on TV urges citizens to endure the pollution, insisting, “There is no progress without dust.”

Our unnamed protagonist, a slacker with a goatee, is no protester. He simply buys a vacuum that comes with a two-week warranty and, to his annoyance, also includes a ghost that wakes him up in the middle of the night. Enter a punky repairman named Krong (Wanlop Rungkumjad), who arrives to explain what’s going on. Krong is handsome, so the vacuum owner agrees to listen.

Boonbunchachoke’s strange and funny script is constructed of multiple nesting stories, like how my own vacuum pops out a pert little dustbuster that really digs into the cracks. The hub of the tale is a haunted electronics factory where a dead worker has returned as a poltergeist (not the one in the vacuum; the spirits here are manifold) to do afterlife overtime as a nuisance.

This ghost rattles industrial hoses and temporarily melds with an air purifier. “Can we still sell it?” the factory’s widowed owner Madame Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon) asks with a resigned sigh. Nitibhon, a Thai supermodel, plays her tycoon as comically drab, keeping her gaunt cheeks slack to emphasize her character’s hollowness.

Before long, the film will shift gears to a third main character, Madame Suman’s daughter-in-law Nat (a steely Davika Hoorne), who recently died of lung disease and longs for her still-living husband March (Witsarut Himmarat). Nat has been resurrected as both her recognizable self, a stoic beauty dressed David Byrne-style with shoulder pads as wide as a refrigerator, and in appliance form as her own upright vacuum — another one — whose plastic shell is her exact shade of burgundy hair.

The low-fi practical effects and erotic hijinks hit just the right tone of silly and sentimental. Vacuum Nat seductively sucks on her husband’s shirt buttons with her brush-tipped nozzles. At first, he’s petrified. Then he gets into it. And that’s not even the best sex scene in the movie.

Madame Suman, however, has always rejected her daughter-in-law in any form — in part because their rural backgrounds are too alike — and places one obstacle after another in the couple’s path, including religion, family pressure and hospitals, where a nurse tells Nat that a sentient appliance no longer has the legal standing to visit her husband. “Follow the rules and don’t cause problems,” the nurse says unempathetically. The ghost has broken the laws of nature but she’s still treated like a cog in the system.

Nat wants to prove she’s a good ghost, not one of the bad ones who cause mischief. The audience would do well to stay attuned to this goal — and how obedient Nat is willing to be.

The plot gets pleasingly messy despite starring a leading lady who was quite literally constructed to tidy up. Dishwatery types become heroes; victims become oppressors. A friendly guy who blunders into one scene looking for a bathroom turns out to be a tyrant responsible for some very bad things. Cruelty isn’t constant or predictable; it’s more often caused by shortsightedness. For the average sinner, that’s closer to the truth.

Themes kick up that you couldn’t have guessed from the first act: provocations about class and caste, continent-spanning capitalism and surveillance states. Likewise, it’s an interesting coincidence that Thailand’s current prime minister is the scion of a wealthy construction company, as is the leader of the United States. The issues in here are topical around the globe, yet it’s handy to go in knowing that Thailand has its own history of deadly crackdowns against liberal activists. Ghosts are everywhere.

“The dead return because they remember and because they are remembered,” a monk advises Madame Suman. The state, however, would rather people forget the past. Here, a slumber party of the rich and powerful wants to zap their misdeeds from memory so they can get a good night’s sleep. We go inside people’s private dreams that are shot like old filmstrips and deteriorate with a snap, crackle and pop. In a sci-fi twist, “A Useful Ghost” also steers us into an electroshock torture chamber coated in massive slabs of white soundproofing that resemble giant foam fangs.

The score is a comical barrage of harp strums, as if heaven’s angels have gotten good and drunk. Otherwise, Boonbunchachoke’s ideas are so sharp that he keeps the film’s style restrained. Think stark pastel tableaux by cinematographer Pasit Tandaechanurat and human performers who act about as energetically as furniture. This is the director’s first film, and you sense him working in the same mode as early Yorgos Lanthimos before the Greek provocateur felt confident that a charismatic performance wouldn’t overshadow his script.

His restraint suits a story in which machine-kind and humankind begin to feel shrink-wrapped together, the ghosts belabored by increasing social pressure, the humans jolted by high-voltage wires. An overlong middle stretch sets up several crucial emotional complications so quietly that you might have to pinch yourself a couple times not to miss anything important. When things do explode, though, the tonal shift is almost too frenetic, with spurts of exuberant jazz and startling, only semi-earned violence.

But these wobbles don’t detract from the awareness that you’re enjoying a film of rare ingenuity, the kind of movie that makes you want to rush out of the theater and tell people what you just saw. I’d be a door-to-door vacuum seller for “A Useful Ghost.” Consider this my knock knock.

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