The Maid

"A combination of black comedy and social drama that posits that hell hath no fury like a family maid who thinks she's being scorned...Catalina Saavendra gives an astonishingly complex performance...she carries us through every twist of the film" (Sight and Sound).

"Perceptive psychological chamber drama...darkly comic (Philip French, The Observer). "Superbly nuanced and thoughtful picture" (Anthony Quinn, The Indpendent)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYpfAxo3CIM

The film is a combination of a gripping psychological thriller and a poignant human drama with a startling denouement. Catalina Saavedra plays Raquel, the live-in uniformed maid, working for a well-to-do family in Santiago, Chile, in a handsome house with a pool, attending to the needs of a couple and their teenage children. The children's patrician grandmother comes to visit and does not hesitate to give her views on how the household should be run.

Raquel is treated as one of the family, a tiresome but affectionately regarded cousin or poor relation. The film opens with an embarrassing birthday celebration that the children's mother Pilar (Claudia Celedón) insists on organising for her. Raquel is now 41, with no man or children of her own, and she might be wondering if she has wasted her life in the service of people who don't care about her. She becomes more needy and resentful, more bad-tempered, affecting selective deafness when she does not want to hear an instruction. She has headaches and fainting spells, and when her employers timidly suggest a secondary maid to help her with the chores, Raquel begins a guerrilla war against the unfortunate new arrival and against the family itself.