What begins as Thailand’s answer to The Conjuring morphs into a tangled web of secrets and deceit in Lee Thongkham’s The Maid. Told over three chapters, the audience follows Joy (Ploy Sornarin), a young woman who has just taken a job as a maid, as she breaks the cardinal rule of not asking personal questions about her employers and uncovers a deadly secret for which there will be Hell to pay.
The Maid has a strong opening. Here we join Joy’s predecessor, a woman at her wits end believing the beloved monkey toy of the household’s only child is in some way haunted. We hear the distressed woman recount her experiences to an unimpressed Lady of the house and see, via the magic of flashback, what exactly has traumatised her so. It’s an incredibly effective sequence featuring creepy monkey toys becoming real life monkeys as they stalk after her. Beautifully crafted to generate immediate scares, it’s a scene that is polished enough that it would be worthy of inclusion within The Conjuring universe. Sadly these scare moments don’t last long, Thongkham favouring something more grounded in melodrama than rooted in supernatural. There are some brief scares during chapter one, which serves to introduce the characters and set up the status quo, but by chapter two these ghostly instances are forgotten about.
The middle section rewinds to the past to explain the circumstances and secrets behind Joy’s working environment. This section is especially sluggish as Thongkham looks into every tiny aspect of the story in great detail, perhaps explaining itself too much and bogging itself down with its own history. Although Thongkham focuses on the story, the problem is that it’s a fairly simple plot. It’s the kind of narrative that appears like it could be straight out of an American soap opera. Connections between characters are screamingly obvious and any impact is lost. By taking so long to arrive at what has essentially been staring us in the face, the film airs on the edge of tedium.
It isn’t until the final part, when The Maid reveals its intentions, that things get fun again; the final chapter explores the explosive consequences of revelations from the past. Once set in motion, this climatic act is a sublime and heady mix of hedonistic blood spurting and over-zealous stabbings. It’s a shame that some of these elements are held back for so long as it is this climax that really piques the viewer’s attention.
The Maid
Summary
The Maid is a film that is forever morphing, from haunted house, to the soapiest of soaps, to an all out slasher splatterfest. In its constant shift in style and tone the film never manages to claim a voice for itself, making it hard to identify exactly what audience it has been created for. Presented as a single story told in three parts, each unlike the chapter before, The Maid has an identity crisis and suffers because of it. Add in a bloated middle third and a ton of excessive exposition and it’s hard to get onside with The Maid. This is a huge shame as it starts and ends so well.
The Maid was reviewed at Arrow Video FrightFest 2021.
