furious grace (now streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime) won the grand jury prize at SXSW in 2023 and it’s easy to see why. Director Paris Zarcilla’s debut feature is a provocative, socially conscious thriller with a hint of horror that would make Hitchcock himself raise an eyebrow with pride. It’s the story of an undocumented Filipino immigrant desperately trying to keep her young daughter safe and fed, who doesn’t see that a too-good-to-be-true job opportunity is actually an opportunity. huge can of worms and, since these things inevitably work, you can’t put the lid back on once everyone is freeing whether you want to or not, and so on.
GRACE FURY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: We open with a SCARE, hello! Joy (Max Eigenmann) is asleep under a pile of blankets and pillows on a couch and tends to wake up quite suddenly. Bad dreams. Probably a side effect of anxiety. She and her eight- or ten-year-old daughter Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla) are homeless. Joy is a maid who sneaks quietly into her employers’ fancy homes when they’re away. She meets with a probably shady broker who is trying to get her a visa, but is £5,000 short of the £15,000 she needs. “Because Your people Do I always do this? the runner asks, and it’s not the last time we’ll hear that. Your peopleand considering Joy is a non-white undocumented person, this is probably, by a conservative estimate, the millionth time she’s heard it.
Adding to Joy’s stress: Grace is rebellious, and you wonder if her mean little pranks (e.g. sneaking sauce into the kettle) are an extension of her frustration with her mother, or a bit of food. -Rich man caper for when wealthy (and almost certainly white) people come home and sit down for a cup of tea and a bit of casual racism. Both things could be true, of course. From the looks of it, her chaotic, anti-sedentary lifestyle means that Grace doesn’t go to school or interact with her peers or do many things typical of a normal child. It’s just survival, survival, survival, so it’s no surprise that she’s acting out and making her mother’s life harder than she already is.
You can’t help but feel sorry for the poor boy, and that’s before Joy literally puts Grace in a suitcase. Having a child can be a burden when you have to take them to work with you, and Joy doesn’t want to risk the good job she just got. She carries the suitcase to a huge country mansion, and one look at the place makes us invoke the OG. Amityville-slash-exhortation from Jordan Peele: go outside! Note the word choice: it’s not just any mansion, but a gothic thing with more vibes than rooms, and it has a lot of damn rooms. That’s why, lordship.
So here is the situation. A haughty you-know-what, Katherine (Leanne Best), hires Grace to clean the place, which is filled with creepy portraits and antique furniture, all covered in plastic and dusty sheets. Grace will also help care for Katherine’s elderly and ailing uncle, Mr. Garrett (David Hayman), who is essentially comatose in bed. Her first impulse upon seeing him is to put her hands together and pray for him, and then her barely awakened hand reaches out and GRABES her. The place is so big that Joy has her own bedroom and it would be easy for Grace to blend in if she just stayed hidden inside the closet, which she never does, of course. (You don’t know whether to be amused or empathize with Joy’s anxious frustration.) Katherine has to go away for a few days, so Joy has a break from the exhausting condescension, and Grace can wander… wander. She walks into Mr. Garrett’s room and discovers that his niece has been drugging him, which sure seems like fucking dirty play, right? This is when we find out that Joy used to be a nurse, she took an oath and she can’t let this situation stay asleep in her bed with a feeding tube stuck up her nose.
What movies will it remind you of?: With Grace running around and hiding in the mansion while we grit our teeth (and laugh, more than a little) hoping Katherine doesn’t notice, and the sort of top-down dynamic, you can’t help but think of Bong Joon-Ho Parasite. And it explores some similar issues of class pision that salty burn I was too unfocused and selfish to address it clearly.
Performance worth seeing: Eigenmann is a rock-solid protagonist and makes it impossible not to feel Joy’s insides tighten in knots from all the stress. It’s also something of a spoiler to say that Hayman delivers a performance that’s more than just a corpse, but we should note how he steals some scenes as the story unfolds.
Memorable dialogue: A mispronounced word, taken from a stupid phrase that came out of the mouth of one of Joy’s rich, idiotic employers: “Filipeenees.”
Sex and skin: None.
Our opinion: Zarcilla’s ambition cannot be denied: furious grace finds significant dramatic traction both personally and politically, and in the big, messy, complicated area where the two overlap in its Venn diagram. There’s a moment where Joy is so nervous that we hear her stomach gurgle, then gurgle again, then she runs to the bathroom, and it’s a throwaway moment with no greater meaning than to make her very relatable to us. who have experienced stress of such intensity that it manifests itself in physical discomfort. That is, all of us. And I don’t want to be too glib or gloss over the film’s critical depiction of privilege or racial disparity, but having an upset stomach during a time of high anxiety is one of the things that makes us human. It’s loose poop as the great unifier.
I apologize for the harsh images. But this is relevant in a story where our protagonist is treated as inferior, especially by Katherine, who is so insistent that Joy call her. katherine rather ma’am, that the formality of such forced informality is a reminder of everyone’s place here, and that everyone should stay in that place, especially if one is the controller and the other the controlled. Such details reveal that Zarcilla has intentions beyond paying lip service to the struggles of immigrants, or trying to exploit the clichés of horror thrillers that flirt with the supernatural; Writing Joy as a significant woman of faith not only opens the door to a logical indulgence of ghostly imagery, but also displays a sly confluence of character depth, cultural specificity, and classic Hitchcockian thriller tropes.
This does not mean furious grace is airtight: Zarcilla’s use of jump scares, “it’s just a dream” sequences (or is it?), and monologuing villains that border slightly on piracy. But his tone is never very serious; is playful, inferring that we can be amused and entertained, especially by the sly mischief of young Boadilla’s performance, while absorbing ideas about the immigrant experience. The film is astutely directed, intelligent and entertaining, by a director who knows how to touch the audience’s nerves like a piano and their funny bone like an idiophone.
Our call: TRANSMIT IT. furious grace it is a jewel. More of Zarcilla, please.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic living in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
