Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Paris Zarcilla
Starring: Max Eigenmann, Leanne Best, David Heyman, Jaeden
Paige Boadilla
In the early 1960s British cinema began to acknowledge the nation's class
divide with a series of "kitchen sink" dramas that exposed the inequality
of one of the world's most prosperous countries. Roughly a decade later
British horror filmmakers took up the baton. British horror had long been
focussed on fear of "the other," represented by vampires, werewolves,
mummies etc, all of which were essentially foreign in nature. In the early
'70s Britain's horror filmmakers realised that the country's upper classes
were as "other" to the average Brit as any fang-bearing foreigner, and so
we began to get horror movies in which the villains were classic British
toffs, living in regal mansions rather than Transylvanian castles. The
villains of such films often held onto conservative values as opposed to
the liberal protagonists, who more often than not were mini-skirted young
women. Films like House of Whipcord, Virgin Witch and Satan's Slaves saw very
modern women (well, for the time at least) getting themselves in trouble
in the dusty old homes of House of Lords backbenchers.
With his feature debut Raging Grace, British writer-director Paris Zarcilla taps into his Filipino
roots for a modern update on this classic format, adding issues of race
and immigration to the still hot button topic of class.
Max Eigenmann, who drew worldwide attention with her affecting turn
in the gruelling domestic abuse drama
Verdict, plays Joy, a young Filipina living and working illegally in London
while raising her young British-born daughter Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla). During the day Joy cleans homes and at night she and Joy use their
keys to sleep in whichever homes she knows are currently unoccupied by her
employers. Her goal is to raise the £15,000 demanded by a local criminal
who claims he can grant her UK citizenship through dodgy means, but she's
five grand short and he's running out of patience.
As a favour to her local pastor, Joy agrees to call around to the home of
an elderly parishioner, Mr. Garrett (David Hayman), to check if
he's okay. There she finds him in something of a comatose state. When
Garrett's niece, Katherine (Leanne Best), arrives unexpectedly, Joy
pretends to be the new home help. Katherine offers her a proposal, that
she work for £1,000 per week, cash in hand rather than through an agency,
live in a room in the house, and keep her mouth quiet about anything she
sees within the walls of the house. Seeing a possible end to her problems,
Joy readily accepts. She doesn't inform Katherine about Grace, whom she
sneaks into the home inside a suitcase.
If this setup sounds vaguely familiar, you might have seen the recent
South African horror movie
Good Madam, which shared a similar entry point for its own examination of
inequality. But while that movie struggled to do anything interesting with
its premise, the foundation of Raging Grace sets the scene
for a classic twisty thriller, one that keeps you guessing right up to its
Gothic inspired climax. It may touch on some very modern concerns, but
it's a very classically British horror movie, particularly in delivering
the sort of eccentric villains favoured by the likes of James Whale, Pete
Walker and Norman J. Warren. Best's Katherine is the sort of villain you
could imagine Sheila Keith playing if this had been made in 1973, and the
Garrett home is one of those classic British mansions that have seen
better days.
Such familiarities are contrasted by Zarcilla bucking certain conventions.
Most of the film's action takes place in daylight. The threat of death is
largely replaced by something more urgent, that of Joy's potential
eviction and ultimate financial ruin. It's never quite established who the
real villain is, and even by the end it's still not entirely black and
white.
Perhaps what's most striking about Zarcilla's film is how the director
repurposes bedroom farce conventions to create tension and suspense. Some
of the film's most effective sequences have characters hiding under beds
while potential aggressors storm in and out of rooms. It's as heavily
influenced by Fawlty Towers as
The Old Dark House, and while there are some blackly comic moments (mostly courtesy of Best
channelling British sitcom star Penelope Keith), these sequences work to
generate scares rather than scoffs. While the movie is calm and calculated
in its storytelling for much of the running time, Zarcilla isn't afraid to
give us an old-fashioned bonkers climax, riffing on
The Fall of the House of Usher and William Lustig's
Maniac.
Ultimately the film comes down to its put-upon heroine facing a moral
dilemma of whether to keep quiet and take the money or intervene in
whatever she thinks is really at play here. The idea that someone on the
lowest rung of the ladder has to take such self-harming action due to the
squabbling of the upper classes will resonate at a time when the average
Joe (or Joy) is being told to tighten their belt while the richest people
in the world seem to be amassing greater fortunes than ever before.
Raging Grace is on UK/ROI VOD now.
