Critic Reviews

It's funny--bleakly, blackly so at times, but also tenderly funny with flashes of genuine compassion. The Maid is among the best films I've seen this year.

As played by the captivating Mariana Loyola, Lucy is a life force, cut from similar cloth as the perky schoolteacher of Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky": unsinkable, unswervable and more than a little irreverent.

The Maid would have been worthwhile just as a showcase both for good acting and for the director's virtuosity. But the movie's ultimate virtue is its humanity.

Raquel's devotion to her employer is barbed with hatred, need, and an insecurity she manifests through constant tiny acts of sabotage that would be funny if they weren't also so chilling -- bordering on psychotic.

This is strikingly talented cinema from a notable international filmmaker.

Saavedra is riveting as a servant whose unblinking focus on her routine masks a profound loneliness.

In a remarkable performance that won her a special award from the world cinema jury at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Chilean television vet Saavedra goes through one of the most uncanny psychophysical transformations I've ever seen in a movie without the benefit of obvious makeup or other prosthetics.

The Maid has that particular gift of leaving you off balance in the best possible way, and whenever something like that comes around you owe it to yourself to check it out.

Tone is everything here. While likely influenced by Chilean absurdists of another era, such as playwright Egon Wolff, in The Maid Silva treads an ultra-fine line between caricature and character, leaning toward the latter without weighing down an essentially featherweight creation.

In the end what drives the movie is the hip young filmmaker's struggle with himself -- his showman's need to toy with our anxieties threatening to overwhelm his desire to make amends to all the servants he took for granted growing up.