The Maid

Raquel has worked in the same house for twenty three years. She lives in; she raised the children of the house and has no life of her own. She turns forty and they cut a cake in the kitchen. The headaches start. The woman of the house suggests she have help and hires another maid. Raquel treats it as a threat. She locks the new girl out, hides her things, wears her down. The girl leaves. Then another comes. Raquel does the same. Then Lucy arrives, and she does not fight at all. Sebastián Silva directs and co-wrote the screenplay. Catalina Saavedra plays Raquel; Claudia Celedón, Andrea García-Huidobro and Mariana Loyola are in the cast. It is a Chilean production. The film won the grand jury prize in the world cinema dramatic section at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, and Catalina Saavedra took an acting award there. The director wrote the screenplay out of someone who worked in his own family. The matter it treats is a job becoming an identity; there is no longer any separation between Raquel and her work. The narrative does not show the family as bad; they mean well and the situation is still this. The film shows the question of class without raising its voice; even who sits at the table is a marker. Catalina Saavedra does not play the character for sympathy and the narrative does not put her in the right. There is a change in the last section and it comes through a small gesture. Its limit is the watching; the narrative is tense, the character difficult, and the pace slow. Who it is for: viewers who like Chilean cinema and narratives of class. Who it is not for: it is uncomfortable, slow, and the ending quiet.