TIFTY TWOFERS: TIFF 2025 REVIEWS
While we live in increasingly weighty and hopeless times, one of cinema’s greatest powers in times like these is to offer moments of hope, of originality, of curiosity, and to remind us of the ongoing potential for change that capitalism works overtime to distract us from. A Useful Ghost and Egghead Republic are two highly original works that will get even the most seasoned and difficult-to-impress film viewer’s neurons firing, as their narratives ricochet into increasingly bizarre and impossible to predict places.
By Tamar Hanstke
We are living in the era of enshittification. With the rise of AI slop online, the outsourcing of essential product manufacturing to cut costs— and resulting quality—to the bone, and the large-scale collapse of reputable journalism under the mantra of “fake news”, it has become increasingly difficult to trust in anything as a secure life raft away from the continual emotional overwhelm of late-stage capitalism. In Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja’s Egghead Republic and Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s A Useful Ghost, viewers are presented with visions of the future that are, certainly, greatly influenced by the cynicism of our present historical moment; yet, they also offer moments of hope for, if not full-scale structural and political revolution—as was promised in past dystopian franchises like The Matrix or The Hunger Games–at least individual or small-group liberation that simultaneously makes the world a little better by taking a particularly despicable figure of power out of the equation.
A Useful Ghost may be one of the most unexpected films of the entire festival, with many early viewers expressing pleasant surprise at the many twists and turns the film takes beyond its rather simple and whimsical press blurb: “A ghost possesses a vacuum cleaner to try and remain useful to the living after death”. This film is, in fact, an unapologetically queer and anti-capitalist manifesto, opening with a vicious critique of an Amazon-style factory/warehouse full of exploited workers. When one of these workers dies due to the careless cruelty of the factory owners, he returns as a ghost, possessing factory equipment and wreaking havoc throughout the warehouse. Soon, there will be a whole epidemic of ghosts returning with unfinished business, with the next ghost to appear—the one from the blurb, who possesses a vacuum cleaner—turning out to be the tragically deceased wife of the factory owner’s son. The son is overjoyed, his parents less so, particularly after walking in on their son and daughter-in-law engaging in a particularly hilarious moment of sexual-gratification-via-vacuum-cleaner-hose.
While I do not want to reveal too much of the film’s plot, as so much of the joy of the film arises in how unexpectedly its narrative unfolds, I will go so far as to say that the factory owners find ways to bribe their daughter-in-law’s ghost to use her powers for their own disturbing ends, including her ability to see the dreams of the striking factory workers as they sleep. In this way, in opposition to the popular idea that sleep is the one human activity not yet co-opted for capitalist ends, these factory owners actually gain the ability to possess control over their workers even in their most intimate states of sleeping and dreaming, gaining insider knowledge to prevent the workers’ future attempts to improve their working conditions. In this way, the film envisions a still-yet-to-come stage of capitalist surveillance that is even more pervasive and invasive than what we are already experiencing, where even our dreams are not safe from the eyes of our capitalist overlords. Yet—and again, doing my best to avoid spoilers—the film does end on a moment of ultra-violence that is incredibly cathartic at a moment when it seems increasingly impossible to hold accountable the real-life billionaires currently steering our world towards total social, economic, and environmental collapse.
Whereas A Useful Ghost is a singularly original work, Egghead Republic has a rather unexpected origin story, being adapted from a 1957 German sci-fi novel written by Arno Schmidt. While I have no familiarity with the source material, and therefore cannot weigh in on how the story was modified to speak more directly to contemporary events, the film serves as convincing evidence for an argument I have been repeating for far too long: If we must keep making films adapted from pre-existing source material, why not seek out that material which is obscure and/or imperfect, actually allowing a film the possibility to meet or exceed the merits of the original (unlike, for example, the umpteenth adaptation of Wuthering Heights, or even Hamlet, which served as the basis for four different films premiering at TIFF 50)? Indeed, Egghead operates as one of the most original films I saw at TIFF this year, featuring several critical genre shifts that keep the story fresh and interesting: Beginning with the classic story of a young ingénue in journalism, Sonja Schmidt, who finally gets her big break; shifting into a dystopian sci-fi adventure story, as Schmidt and a group of more experienced journalists journey into a long-forbidden zone of nuclear activity originating from a Soviet atomic bomb; and ending with scenes taking place in a more classically futuristic and technologically advanced sci-fi environment; in which the audience finally discovers exactly what is going on in that increasingly mysterious nuclear zone.
As with A Useful Ghost, while I do not want to spoil the many twists and turns that take place in Egghead, I do think it is worthwhile to signpost that this film ends with a viscerally grotesque, yet emotionally satisfying moment of power shifting hands from the most despicable and privileged to someone who has been downtrodden and underestimated throughout the film. While this power shift is not so radical or structurally disruptive as the one in A Useful Ghost—there is no promise that the ‘winning’ character has plans to change the system they suddenly find themselves near the top of–it still serves as a cathartic story of revenge, and of a marginalized person climbing up the ladder of power that was meant to have already been pulled up and out of their reach.
My appreciation of Egghead was further cemented by the post-film Q&A with the writers/directors and the main cast, in which they, among other things, confirmed the intentionality of the parallels between the film’s most visible antagonist—a misogynist and rapist with a heavily self-inflated sense of his own journalistic abilities—and the likes of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Most memorable, however, was when an audience member asked a question, loosely paraphrased, regarding the directors’ and cast’s thoughts about the role of “genius” in artistic creation. The filmmakers and cast almost unanimously reacted with disgust, with various explanations on how the conflation of “genius” with “art” and other forms of innovation is how we wind up with figures like Musk, and a larger global system in which self-serving, egotistical figures are able to rise to power based on a performative show of “genius” rather than any real merit. The filmmakers instead advocated for creating art simply for art’s sake, letting go of practices that inflate the hubris and ego of any individual player in that artistic creation. This mindset clearly worked for this crew, who put out one of the most original films of the festival, and I hope this success brings them many more opportunities to continue honing their craft—art for art’s sake.
While we live in increasingly weighty and hopeless times, one of cinema’s greatest powers in times like these is to offer moments of hope, of originality, of curiosity, and to remind us of the ongoing potential for change that capitalism works overtime to distract us from. A Useful Ghost and Egghead Republic are two highly original works that will get even the most seasoned and difficult-to-impress film viewer’s neurons firing, as their narratives ricochet into increasingly bizarre and impossible-to-predict places. While neither film carries off all of its experimentations perfectly, there is joy to be found in such narratives that both reflect and acknowledge the darkness of our times, and yet still hail us to keep fighting for something better.
Pink Asparagus 
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