Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prix winner “A Useful Ghost” is finally headed to U.S. theaters, with a new domestic poster and trailer announcing a January 16 release via Cineverse and positioning it as a deadpan, dust-choked ghost story about grief, labor, and a woman who comes back by possessing a vacuum cleaner.
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The premise is wonderfully strange. March is mourning his wife, Nat, who has recently died from dust pollution. One day, he realizes her spirit has returned inside a vacuum cleaner. His family, already disturbed by a ghost that appeared after a worker’s death, shut down their factory, and want nothing to do with this human-ghost relationship. To win them over, Nat offers to cleanse the cursed factory herself. If she’s going to be allowed to stay, she has to become “a useful ghost” by clearing out all the useless ones.
The cast includes Davika Hoorne, Witsarut Himmarat, Apasiri Nitibhon, Wanlop Rungkumjud, and Wisarut Homhuan, with the trailer leaning into the absurdity of a household appliance as both haunting and a lifeline. The tone is closer to melancholic workplace satire than conventional jump-scare horror.
Early festival reactions have already framed the film as something singular. Screen International wrote, “If Yorgos Lanthimos relocated to Thailand, his next film might look something like critic, teacher, writer and director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s ‘A Useful Ghost.’”
For Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, the feature caps a steady rise in festival popularity. The Bangkok-based filmmaker first drew international attention with his short film “Red Aninsri; Or, Tiptoeing on the Still Trembling Berlin Wall,” which won the Junior Jury award at Locarno 2020 and played at festivals such as Torino, FNC, and Glasgow, among others. “A Useful Ghost” premiered in Cannes’ Semaine de la Critique in 2025 and won the Critics’ Week Grand Prize; the new U.S. trailer now sells it as that rare genre import where the ghost story, the factory floor, and the climate crisis all share the same haunted machine.
