Directed by Sebastian Silva, The Maid won the World Cinema Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival.  Beautifully acted by an ensemble cast that makes an upper class professional family totally believable, its problem lies in the director’s attempt to create expectations similar to genre movies we know and then subvert them.  The film opens with the family preparing a surprise birthday celebration for the maid who has worked for them and raised the children for over twenty years.  Raquel is a dour woman, uneasy with displays of affection and mired in the compulsive execution of  her daily routine.  Both shrewd and capable, she is also hamstrung by her growing rigidity, exacerbated by unexplained headaches and dizzy spells that cause two accidents, one serious enough to land her in the hospital.  As other maids are brought in to assist her, we see her grow increasingly paranoid in her need to protect her territory against usurpers.  She locks the successive maids out of the house, imperiously demeans them and eventually pushes the envelope by discarding a new kitten acquired by the oldest daughter, a college student who sees clearly what her mother will not face.

     The incident with the kitten reminds us of Catherine Deneuve as a psychotic shopgirl with a dead rabbit in her purse in Polanski’s Repulsion;  the mind games that the maid uses to thwart her perceived adversaries recall movies from Rebecca to The Hand That Rocks The Cradle.  We are being led down a cinematic trail that usually ends with an explosive, often violent denouement.  There is in fact a physical catfight, the destruction of the husband’s precious model ship and the enforced bed rest of the sullen, progressively creepy maid.  As with many parables and folk tales, there must be two failures, after which the third assistant to the maid can succeed in bringing us the moral core of this fable.  Lucy, a friendly open woman, who can sunbathe in the nude and physically embrace the maid with her expansive empathy, converts her from the black rage of loneliness and isolation to the community of friendship and love.  Like Jesus, Lucy turns the other cheek and instead of expressing indignation at Raquel’s insults, she comforts her and enfolds her in the bosom of her own family.  Lest we miss what is happening, this grace occurs at Christmas-time and frees Raquel from her bitter restraints so that she can call her own mother and weep at her previous callousness.  We see her begin to shed her paranoid distrust of people, to smile, to subsequently plan a surprise party for Lucy that will close the cycle with which the film began.  By setting Lucy as her guiding light, she literally takes on her characteristics and by the end of the movie, is listening to music and jogging as her now departed mentor used to do.

     Lucy’s converstion of Raquel to the healing powers of Christian love is made even clearer by the maid’s rejection of a man’s physical love in favor of the platonic sisterly love that she hungrily absorbs and emulates.  The difficulty we have in accepting this reversal of behavior is that the spiritual message undermines the psychological portrait of a woman well beyond the bounds of normalcy.  You can’t create a character as stolid, damaged and unrelenting as Raquel and then expect us to believe that an act of friendship alone would be sufficient to heal her.  Repeated scenes of Raquel angrily disinfecting the bathtub with cleansers powerful enough to cause physical recoil can’t be smoothed over with Christian hugs and loving the wretched.  In short, it would take more than Jesus to turn Mrs. Danvers (Rebecca) into Mary Poppins and Sebastian Silva is not that miracle worker.

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