Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke had breakout success with his debut feature, A Useful Ghost, that premiered at Cannes Film Festival last year.
The promising Thai filmmaker is back with a wacky short film.
The Bovine Comedy premiered at the Locarno Film Festival 2026.
Trust Thai filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke to catch you unawares by his unusual wit and winning cheekiness. There’s a delightful impudence to his storytelling that relishes the oddest turns as only the most natural impulses. The filmmaker broke out last year at Cannes with his debut, A Useful Ghost, an irresistible blend of absurd humour and biting political satire. No one could ever quite look at a vacuum cleaner in the same wayafter the film. He follows up the feature with a new short film, The Bovine Comedy, another rich testament to his singularly mischievous imagination.
Premiering as part of the Pardi di Domani section in Locarno 2026, the short film is spiked with mirth, tonal unpredictability and delicious erotic tension. It’s a terrific little fable that teasingly doles out few shreds of a dystopian future, planting vivid characters and even more memorably drawn dilemmas and reckonings. We are hurled into 2036. A virus has wiped off most of the global bovine population. Artificial insemination is pushed for breeding. Thailand has one of Southeast Asia’s three remaining fertile bulls. Boonbunchachoke opens his film in the shed of the particular bull, Giant. Phop, a well-heeled, wheelchair-bound farmer (Sadanont Durongkavarojana), and his partner, Bow (Prim Patnasiri), watch on as a worker, Jon (Pakapol Srirongmuang) performs the bull’s semen-drawing ritual. It’s an elaborate, intimate dance. A disco ball’s darting lights add to the atmosphere.
As Jon tenderly kneads the bull, summoning a buildup, Phop is keening. It’s as if he is eager to be the one receiving those caresses. The lines blur between the act being for the bull’s fertility and the master’s desperately sought arousal. Phop yearns for Jon’s touch. He’s eager, restless. Someone with his power and capital can’t be easily halted or denied. The ritual with the bull becomes an exercise for Phop’s repressed sexuality to unleash. Bow quietly stands by him, helpless and strapped to see his wishes through. Others pop up at Phop’s place, hoping to learn a secret or two from Jon on how he keeps the bull fertile. All Jon has a gift is that. He won’t pass it up.
However, Jon is at Phop’s mercy, subject to his whims. It’s an exploitative relationship. But Phop also needs him. He’s ready to do whatever it takes: “I can dress as a bull to make it look professional”. Autozoophilia? Phop knows his higher social rank licenses him to get away with his orders and manipulations. He leches onto Jon, but keeps getting spurned. He even reassures him, “My cock is no different from a bull”. For Jon, it’s unimaginable to do what his master is asking. Promises of a hefty remuneration are snubbed. The bristling Phop puts up with the rejection for only so long before he plots something that makes Jon bend.
Boonbunchachoke deploys an attitude to desire and intimacy that’s by turns frank, tentative, exhilarating, drily matter-of-fact and grimace-inducing. Where most filmmakers seem to cudgel through queerness and get stuck up in appropriateness, he’s refreshingly liberal and thrillingly curious. We’re dropped onto a specific context but backstory is contained to just a suggestion here, a whisper there. He lets a character be deplorable and squirm-inducing but not without tethering him to the most aching desperation. There are peculiar bargains to dress up thrusting desire, demand something else to fulfil gratification. Even threats are orchestrated that lead back to desires that might seek a different attire but are no less insistent. Phop’s proposition limns Jon’s fate. It’s only a matter of time. Then, we also get a glimpse of Jon’s family life, which he brings up to dispel Phop’s advances.
A smart, wry comment on social dynamics, power, transgression, unruly desires, The Bovine Comedy culls unexpected angles, startling transactions. There’s awkwardness, unease as the employer goads his worker. Subtly enmeshed is the connotation of fetish that a social superior derives from having those lower in the echelons to satisfy their appetite. Phop and his wife have no impulse to shade the exchange with any tinge of morality. He views it as a practical deal, rendering which Jon will be paid. For the powerful, their acts and expectations are fair and perfectly reasonable up until their positions are jolted. The Bovine Comedy traces such navigations, knotted by class and sexuality, with farcical ease. Boonbunchachoke approaches a simple conceit whose layers unwrap with zany appeal. Slyly imaginative, The Bovine Comedy puts a wicked spin on how desire can erupt via ceaseless routes of being, changing disguise quicker than fathom.
