Sebastián Silva’s The Maid begins as a wry look at the fault lines between domestic familiarity and class disparity and gradually morphs into a kind of blackly comic quasi-monster movie, before segueing into an empathetic, restrained tale of personal growth. Yet Silva keeps quietly recalibrating the film’s generic parameters while keeping its central questions consistent. It’s a fairly elegant trick, and if Silva’s shifts in tone result in a bit of viewer whiplash, actress Catalina Saavedra guides us through with a nuanced and tightly controlled central performance. She keeps us coming back, with equal parts sympathy and fascination, to the same query: who is this woman, and what is her deal? Saaverda is Raquel, the eponymous domestic worker. A slightly hunched figure with a mop of black ringlets, eyes filled with suspicion, and lips perennially twisted into a frown, Raquel has been employed by the upper-class Valdez family for 23 years. Right from the start, the film takes a cock-eyed view of Raquel’s relationship with the Valdezes, highlighting her neither-this-nor-that status as a live-in paid employee with a crisply observed birthday celebration for Raquel put on by the family (who cleans up the dishes after?). Each family member has a particular relationship with Raquel— running the gamut from teasing affection to guilt-laced sympathy to outright hostility— and Silva attunes his ear to the specific ways the family speaks to and about her. From the very beginning, though, we get the sense that there is more to this story than the awkward negotiation of personal bonds and professional responsibilities. If Raquel’s outside-looking-in position leads to moments of simultaneous resentment and affection for the family she serves, her bizarre behavioral tics and perennial dourness suggest a knottier, more troubling past. Silva elides this central mystery, dropping occasional hints of a troubled family life without going into specifics. In this way, The Maid places us in the ambivalent position of both knowing and not knowing Raquel: privy to her private moments of exhaustion and anger without fully understanding the poisoned well from which they spring. It’s a choice at once empathetic and distancing, switching up the film’s primary trajectory from social satire to character study; and Silva takes pleasure in pushing us to consider just how far we are willing to extend our sympathy to a character whose behavior dips into some pretty strange—and often cruel—places. via: Reverse Shot
