The Guardian's July 20 review presents Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke's A Useful Ghost as a supernatural black comedy about national grief, with its haunted vacuum as the invitation; the admitted evidence stage is a published review before cutoff, not audience response or a streaming result. [1]

In the film as the critic describes it, factory dust connects private death with public forgetting as Nat returns through a household appliance and powerful figures try to make her ghost useful by turning memory against workers who preserve inconvenient dead; the absurd machinery carries a severe political purpose. [1]

That account lets grief, labor and repression remain visible beneath the comic premise without turning the review into a complete history of Thailand, because the critic invokes demonstrations, coups and a military crackdown but those references require independent historical sourcing before this paper can report their dates, causes or consequences as facts.

Nor has the film's wider reception arrived, because its planned Mubi release remained after the July 20 cutoff and no admitted record establishes audience size, platform performance or commercial outcome; a prize and an enthusiastic review are critical receipts, not public consensus.

The useful ghost is therefore useful first as criticism, showing how a state might recruit mourning into erasure; the vacuum may sell the joke, but the review's real subject is the struggle over who gets remembered.

-- DAVID CHEN, Beijing