'Angry Grace' Review: Immigration and Exploitation Seen Through the Lens of Brazen Horror Movie

British horror Raging Grace has a strong social commentary, but the film itself isn’t always like that, and when it’s rummaging through the toolbox, neither Scary and not so convincing

Yet, despite its scares and haunted houses, this debut feature from British-born Filipino screenwriter-director Paris Zarcilla Hysterical, yet with its message. The message is simple but effective: In a world where immigrants toil at the behest of a privileged ruling class, sometimes more like indentured servants than free men, the horrors of everyday life far exceed anything the film can ever create.

Angry Grace

Bottom line Darker social satire than a horror movie.

Place : SXSW Movie Festival (Narrative Feature Film Competition) Cast: Max Eigenmann, Jaeden Paige Boadilla, Leanne Best, David Hayman Director and screenwriter: Paris Zarcilla 1 hour39 minute

Raging Grace Much of it explores the ongoing system of exploitation, following a Filipino mom, Joy ( Max Eigenmann cleaned swanky London houses for a living and paid the exorbitant visas that allowed her to stay in the UK. With her mischievous young daughter Grace (Jaden Page Boadilla) forever on the trail, Joy bounces from job to job and crashes into whatever space her master has temporarily vacated. A mansion, and when they come home, they hardly know she’s around.

More a tongue-in-cheek black satire than a thriller, the film shows Joe How desperate Yee is to find a job that will give her and her daughter some stability – which is why she accepts the creepy country estate of aging Mr. Garrett (David Heyman) so easily. Mr. Garrett, the remaining heir to a vast family fortune, is slowly dying of cancer.

Most people don’t spend an hour in the semi-abandoned mansion covered in dust and sheets and ruled by Garrett’s visibly evil niece Catherine (Leanne Best) – an obnoxious aristocrat who almost treats Joey like trash. But the latter has no choice at this point, so she sneaks Grace in and gives her daughter another temporary home, no matter how unhappy.

Zahira let out a mild shock when Joey and Grace discovered that all was not as it seemed in Garrett’s house. While the scare tactics are familiar and never scary, the story becomes more interesting when we learn that Joy is not the first Filipino caretaker for a family that has been exploiting her immigrant community for generations .

Raging Grace doesn’t quite manage to tie social criticism to its clumsy genre trappings, which is in the third act. (Another horror movie with a similar setting — Lorcan Finnegan’s Nocebo, released last year — also failed at the task, although it More of a straightforward genre film.)

Zarcilla does lend an elegant sheen to the antics, and Joel Honeywell’s clever cinematography captures the The interior of the elite, as if they belonged to the Architectural Digest propagation. The director also adopted Ari Aster’s chapter titles, quoting classic novelist and colonial apologist Rudyard Kipling, to emphasize how Joy and Grace are the latest victims of a long-running empire.

The mother and daughter prove to be a touching couple from the start as they navigate a world filled with eccentric aristocrats and London families who don’t care about their welfare. This is of course a one-sided view, and the native Englishman is nothing more than a caricature here. Still, Zarcilla manages to build enough empathy for his heroines that, in a pinch, we don’t mind them dropping a few dead bodies in order to survive.

Eigenmann gives it his all as a woman who must weigh every move against the risk of being deported back to the Philippines, while Paige Boadilla has the audacity to play a girl born in England to an unknown father, Free to roam and reap chaos. Grace isn’t exactly the “raucous” character the title promises to be, even though she’s brutal in the final scene, inevitably bleeding when the knife comes out. But her refusal throughout the film to accept the degraded status of her mother and many other Filipinos in the past may end up being her salvation.

Full credits

Venue: SXSW Film Festival (Narrative Feature Film Competition)

Production company: Last Conker

Cast: Max Eigenmann, Jaeden Paige Boadilla, Leanne Best, David Hayman

Director, Screenwriter: Paris Zarcilla Producer: Zhitai Director of Photography: Joel Honeywell Production Design: Amy Addison
Editor: Chris Chow Composer: Jon Clark

Casting Directors: Katy Covell, Ollie Gilbert

Sales: Blue Sparrow Film Distribution

English, Tagalog 1 hour 39 minutes

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