***½/****
starring Leanne Best, Jaeden Paige Boadilla, Max Eigenmann, David Hayman
written and directed by Paris Zarcilla
by Walter Chaw What sets something like Paris Zarcilla’s Raging Grace apart from similar servant/master, immigrant/colonizer stuff like Lorcan Finnegan’s Nocebo is how it offers glimpses of joy amid the suffering. We see a community at play and worship, united in song, celebrating one another, exultant and safe–at odds with how their oppression is generally centred in otherwise sympathetic texts. Jubilation, it turns out, is a useful tool to ratchet up the tension in a film about isolation and domestic enslavement. When you grasp what can be lost, the stakes become unbearably high. Raging Grace isn’t a happy film, but there’s happiness in it, starting with the hopefulness of its hero’s name, Joy (Maxene Eigenmann). Joy’s a homeless Filipino house cleaner on an expired visa to the UK struggling to care for her impetuous daughter, Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla), on very little money and under the constant threat of discovery and deportation. The two survive by squatting in clients’ homes while they’re away, and Zarcilla has a lovely touch with the stolen days where mother and daughter pretend to have a place of their own. The rest of Joy’s life is a hustle: to get more work, to hold onto existing work, to keep her kid entertained and hidden, and to try to leave the panic out of her voice when she talks to family she’s left behind in the Philippines. Before Raging Grace becomes a horror film, it’s already a horror film.
Joy gets an offer she can’t refuse. At a palatial old-wealth manse, Joy finds herself in the employ of severe, exacting barrister Katherine (Leanne Best), who, despite her demanding manner, insists Joy not call her “ma’am.” When Joy has a hard time remembering this, Katherine loses her temper in a way that seems genuinely unhinged. Still, Katherine is offering Joy a ridiculous amount of money (for Joy) to leave her agency and become not only a full-time cleaner for Katherine but also, as an additional responsibility, the caregiver for Mr. Garrett (David Hayman), who needs someone to keep vigil despite being in a state of catatonia. Fearing Katherine will refuse to take in Grace as well, Joy smuggles her into the home and instructs her to make herself scarce whenever the lady of the house is around. Grace, however, is full of energy and mischief, experimenting with what she can drop into Mr. Garrett’s mouth from above, delighting in scaring the life out of Joy, and finally making a terrible discovery in the attic that Joy is too stressed-out to believe is real and not merely another fib from her wolf-crying child. But then other discoveries are made: a sheaf of letters, a suspicious pill, and suddenly what seemed like the answer to Joy’s dreams turns out to be a trap in which her good intentions are taken for granted by people used to profiting off the toil of others.
To tell more would be to say too much. Raging Grace is about how fraught the relationship between the ruling class and their servants can be, how freighted it is and always will be with the entire history of one’s exploitation of the other. Zarcilla sets up the dread of the picture’s second half with quick glimpses of the awkward conversations Joy’s clients try to strike up with her–or don’t, in the case of a creep who just hangs out watching her scrub the carpet on her hands and knees. I like the rich lib who goes long on her admiration for Joy’s people and how it’s set against an absolute monster who’s actually fluent in Tagalog to the initial surprise–and ultimate dismay–of Grace and Joy. I love how discomfiting this movie is, how expertly it offers relief, only to dispel it by challenging our prejudices. Surely a white person learning to speak your language is a sign of respect and decency; surely, a genuine appreciation of a culture means a commensurate respect for that culture based on a sense of equality–or, failing that, human decency. It’s possible a predator learns the language of its prey to become a better hunter, in the same way a taxidermist learns that skin itself attaches to muscle. Raging Grace describes the line separating admiration and fetishization while also touching on issues of childhood codependency, absent or overwhelmed parents, and immigration hurdles that prove insurmountable for everyone except the richest or most connected. And through it all, anchoring the film with a complete lack of guile, is young Grace. I hated her for not being sensitive to their situation, and I loved her for the glimpses of my own children I could see in her little rebellions and bursts of bored energy. Her plight is the plight of every second-generation immigrant trying to make sense of their parent’s choices and regrets. It’s a horrorshow, but if you’re lucky, there’s grace at the end of the tunnel.
