Wanlop Rungkumjad – Windows on Worlds

Right at the beginning of Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s A Useful Ghost (ผีใช้ได้ค่ะ, Phi Chaidai Kha), we see a man creating a classical-style relief that’s positioned in a tranquil spot surrounded by nature. It features people from all walks of life, a mother and her child, a monk, a scholar, a soldier, a labourer and so on, as well as a goat, and is later revealed to have the title “democracy monument”. But as soon as it’s put up, it’s brought violently down as developers move in to replace this oasis of peace with a modern shopping mall.

The construction gives rise to more “dust” which is what’s polluting the country, directly linking rampant capitalism with the erosion of democracy. Even the home lived by the self-proclaimed “Academic Ladyboy” (Wisarut Homhuan) may one day be consumed as the traditional streets are replaced by yet more upscale shopping opportunities. In an effort to get rid of the dust that’s plaguing him, he buys a vacuum cleaner, but it turns out to be haunted and coughs in the middle of the night, spitting out all the dust he made it swallow.

“Dust” is also a term that’s come to stand in for those exploited by this increasingly capitalistic society whose lives are afforded little value, such as factory worker Tok who died after being exposed to too much dust while working at a factory producing vacuum cleaners. Meanwhile, the factory owner’s son has just lost his pregnant wife, Nat (Davika Hoorne), to a respiratory illness caused by dust. Nat has also possessed a vacuum cleaner and reunites with her broken-hearted husband, March (Witsarut Himmarat), but finds herself increasingly compromised after sucking some of the dust out of a government minister’s eyes.

Nat’s desire to stay in the mortal realm longer than is proper is reminiscent of the classic ghost Nang Nak, but what she also becomes is a kind of class traitor increasingly involved with the oppressive regime and betraying her own people to ensure her personal survival. Government minister Dr Paul gets her in on his programme chasing ghosts through dreams and banishing them from people’s memories in order to erase their existence and history. When people refuse to give up their ghosts, he has them given electroshock therapy so that they forget them, as he once tried to do to March before Nat made herself useful to him. And so “dust” and “ghosts” have now become metaphors for those who resist as the souls killed not only during the 2010 massacre but Thammasat University massacre in 1976 rise again to make their presence felt.

According to the Academic Ladyboy, that these ghosts came back at all is itself an act of resistance, as if these memories themselves could become reminders that resistance is possible and things weren’t always this way. He loathes Nat for the choices that she made in turning on her own, but she was also facing other kinds of oppression in never being accepted by her husband’s upperclass family who in themselves become a symbol of autocratic elitism. Her mother-in-law, Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon), who owns the factory and is unsympathetic towards Tok insisting his death was nothing to do with the working environment, submits herself to them too because like Nat she didn’t belong either and felt she had no other choice. Her eldest child Moss was taken away from her because she spoke a Northern dialect and they feared the child wouldn’t learn standard Thai. Now she tries to talk to her son’s Australian husband in Teochew, only for Moss to roll his eyes and say no one knows how to speak that outside Thailand. Just as they rejected Nat for being an outsider, they rejected Moss for being gay until he became useful to them.

The longer Nat stays beyond her allotted time, the more it corrupts her so on restoring her corporality she would betray even March, who has come to sympathise with the ghosts, in order to be allowed to stay and maintain her position. She’s the “useful ghost”, from a certain point a view, but from another, all the others are “useful” too in keeping the spirit of resistance alive. Quirky and surreal with its tales of haunted hoovers, obsessive bureaucracy, and factories where singing is randomly banned, not to mention truly awesome shoulder pads, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s deadpan absurdist drama is deadly serious where it counts right until its intensely cathartic conclusion.

A Useful Ghost screens as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

In a rural village in 1960s Thailand, a young woman sniffs a bottle of expensive French perfume gifted to her by her military suitor, and then opens a bottle of honey obtained from a rickshaw driver childhood friend and smears some of it onto her face. The honey and the perfume in one sense represent choices between two men but also between two ways of life, one timeless and innocent, and the other violently modern. You could say that each is in its way compromised, the life cycle of bees described by the harvester as he smokes them out of their home, while perfume is perhaps only an attempt to remake what nature had already perfected, but in the end the young woman may come to regret her choice decades later longing only for the tranquility of her childhood home.

Told in fragmentary, non-linear flashes of memory belonging either (it seems) to the heroine, Maem (present day: Prapamonton Eiamchan, 1960s: Thaveeratana Leelanuja), or her husband the unnamed Soldier (present day: Sorabodee Changsiri, 1960s: Wanlop Rungkumjad), Jakrawal Nilthamrong’s Anatomy of Time (เวลา) opens with an elderly woman realising the man she has been nursing has died. Picking up a straight razor from a nearby table, she cuts into his thigh and removes what seems to be an ancient bullet, an ironic act of healing which sends us straight back into the past in which the Soldier is part of a militant insurgency that later fails. “How many more must die before you get the nation you want?” a fellow officer asks him, disgusted by his betrayal of a young woman who’d helped them and the implication that they will soon take care of her baby too. The Soldier justifies his actions by insisting that there can either be a fair system under a ruthless leader or else a system full of lies and deception in which the rich exploit the poor. Unconvinced, the officer tells him he’ll have no more part of it, but the Soldier is seemingly too far gone to turn back the bullet in his thigh a symbol of his ongoing corruption.

In subsequent flashbacks, we see the elderly Soldier rejected by the world around him. A nurse hired to care for him, ironically wearing a t-shirt reading “my life is just an old man’s memory”, whispers that she hopes he dies a long and painful death while a local cafe owner throws him out as soon as he, painfully and with great difficulty, sits down unwilling to have a “fascist” in his shop. The older Maem cares for him with great tenderness, though her life cannot have been easy even if their well-appointed home in contemporary Bangkok hints that it was most likely comfortable. Her memories take her back to their courtship, the Soldier young and handsome with his fashionable sunglasses and confident swagger, while she found herself torn by her relationship with the simple local boy Don who took her to see the bees while her outing with the Soldier to what seems to be an almost empty oppressed village eventually turned inexplicably dark and violent. At his funeral only she and another old soldier are present, the man presenting himself as his son (but seemingly not hers) apparently absent.

A conversation with her father had reminded her that as Buddhists they believe that their choices dictate the course of their lives, Maem feeling responsible after Don is beaten up by the military but later it would seem choosing the Soldier anyway. A stand in for her nation, Jakrawal Nilthamrong seems to imply that Maem may have been beguiled by the false promises of modernity falling for a man whose handsome face masked his ruthless violence. At the end of her life she chooses to go back to the rural past, returning to wind the clock at her father’s shop its heart beating once again. Perhaps she regrets her choice, perhaps the Soldier regretted his that left him an outcast, but now all they have are memories as imperfect as they may be with their echoes of other lives and the untapped possibilities of youth. Often beautifully photographed if somewhat obscure, Jakrawal Nilthamrong’s ethereal drama contemplates the legacies of trauma historical and personal while embracing finally the tranquility of life beside a wide river as his elliptical tale concludes with both dream and exit.

Anatomy of Time streams in Poland until Nov. 29 as part of the 15th Five Flavours Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Tag: Wanlop Rungkumjad

A Useful Ghost (ผีใช้ได้ค่ะ, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, 2025)

Anatomy of Time (เวลา, Jakrawal Nilthamrong, 2021)