Film review: Raging Grace mixes horror scares with tale of Filipinx domestic worker and her daughter
Paris Zarcilla’s genre-masher mixes Gothic frights with biting social commentary in a story haunted by the ghosts of colonialism
Raging Grace is at the Rio Theatre at 9:15 pm on December 5
JUMP SCARES AND GOTHIC horror meet biting social commentary in Raging Grace, British-Filipinx filmmaker Paris Zarcilla’s genre-busting new thriller.
It centres around Joy (Max Eigenmann), a single, undocumented-immigrant Filipinx mother who works housekeeping jobs in London, supporting her feisty child Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla). Essentially homeless, they secretly move between upscale townhouses as employers go on vacation (when they’re not bedding down in a cluttered service room).
Joy takes her biggest risk when she accepts a gig at a spooky, labyrinthine mansion, hoping to hide her daughter in her bedroom as she works. Snooty Katherine (Leanne Best) has hired her to keep house and care for her aging uncle—dying aristocrat Mr. Garrett (David Hayman), who’s confined to bed and comatose.
Zarcilla takes care to show the power dynamic here, whether it’s Katherine’s refusal to respect Joy’s private space, barging into her quarters unannounced, or treating her as silent and invisible, knowing someone in her position can’t speak out about anything they witness. In case Joy has any confusion about her place in the hierarchy, Katherine politely tells Joy: “Try to remember this is your place of work. Not your home.”
To give away much more would ruin some of the surprises here. Zarcilla has fun with old-school scares in the house at night, about the only time Grace can run around freely. The mansion’s secrets interweave with the real-life nightmare Joy contends with, haunted by bad dreams that hint at past traumas as a domestic worker. The score, which draws on traditional instruments from the Philippines, is hauntingly atmospheric, and there are playful intertitles lifted from Rudyard Kipling’s cringily imperialist poem The White Man's Burden (which exhorted Americans to colonize the Philippines).
Throughout, Eigenmann instills Joy with a sense of dignity and strength—placid as her employers want, perhaps, but never passive. But Zarcilla, true to his title (and a son to immigrant workers himself), is just as interested in Grace, who pushes back against the oppression her mother has had to accept and is clearly suffering from a lack of connection to her culture.
There are plot twists that strain credibility in the second half, and sometimes Best and Hayman’s acting verges on caricature, but you have to admire Zarcilla’s ambitions—as well as his cathartic finale. He doesn’t need supernatural horrors to frighten his viewers; there are enough ghosts of colonialism haunting the real world.
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