Murderous Maids

Genuinely unnerving movie.

The movie avoids sensationalism. What it requires and what it delivers is performance.

Sylvie Testud gives such a ferociously controlled performance that the messy murder seems like a necessary release.

Doesn't shy away from the social or psychological explanations of the Le Mans murders, but never comes down on one side or another.

Director Jean-Pierre Denis doesn't explore psychological motives, which are, finally, unknowable. What he accomplishes in his chilling, unnerving film is a double portrait of two young women whose lives were as claustrophic, suffocating and chilly as the attics to which they were inevitably consigned.

There's a curiously ho-hum quality to the murders, despite the fact that the two victims are bludgeoned, sliced, chopped and jabbed, and also (the movie suggests) get their eyeballs gouged out.

Never inspires more than an interested detachment.