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The Maid Movie Review

The Maid is a 2009 drama film directed by Sebastian Silva and starring Catalina Saavedra. It’s a very well made and moving drama.

This is a drama centered on a maid trying to hold on to her position after having served a family for 23 years. She will try everything to keep other maids away from the house she is working in. My only issue with this movie is that it was never as comedic as it obviously could have been. Yes, there were those amusing stretches of humor spread throughout this movie, but only sporadically. This premise is essentially a comedic one, so I would have personally gone with a dramedy approach.

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With that being said, the movie still really worked. This is in no small part thanks to the main performance from Catalina Saavedra. She was absolutely terrific here and she sold all of her character’s complex emotions beautifully. This is a role that demanded a lot from its actress and thankfully she delivered in spades. Raquel is this film and it was so wonderful following her every action on screen.

The Maid also developed the Lucy character pretty well and I loved the dynamic that eventually developed between the two. I found the family that they were serving utterly unlikable, but that was definitely the point there. There is a lot of warmth and humor to be found in the scenes between the two women in the second half.

The first half of The Maid is somewhat less interesting and mostly just a setup, but the second half was excellent, dramatic and emotionally rewarding. The movie is so well directed by Sebastian Silva and now I am interested to see more of his works as he did such a good job with this story. It’s also very well edited, paced and shot, though at times the shaky cam was annoying to me.

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