One of the most formally assured debut features I saw last year, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s A Useful Ghost tells a peculiar, transfixing paranormal tale. A premiere at Cannes’ Semaine de la Critique where it won the Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize, and Thailand’s official Oscar entry, it’ll now open in U.S. theaters on January 16, 2026. Ahead of the release, Cineverse has now debuted the new trailer and poster.
Here’s the synopsis: “March is mourning his wife Nat who has recently passed away due to dust pollution. He discovers her spirit has returned by possessing a vacuum cleaner. Disturbed by a ghost that appeared after a worker’s death shut down their factory, his family reject their unconventional human-ghost relationship. Trying to convince them of their love, Nat offers to cleanse the factory. To become a useful ghost, she must first get rid of the useless ones.”
I said in my review, “While ghosts and spirits have long been the conduit for cinematic scares and jolts, from The Innocents to Poltergeist to The Ring, a relatively recent wave of films exploring the supernatural has been more concerned with the tangible, emotional effects these specters can have on the living. In that sense, a spiritual cousin to the likes of Uncle Boonmee, Personal Shopper, A Ghost Story, and Light from Light, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s directorial debut A Useful Ghost is a strange, tranquil, humorous exploration of the conundrums that would emerge were ghosts an accepted occurrence in everyday life, and what such phantoms could illuminate about the social and political troubles of modern Thailand and industrialization at large.”
See the trailer and poster below.
