Thank you to co-producer Chi Thai, who is also Co-Founder of MilkTea Films for inviting me to watch and review Raging Grace. If you have a show, event, book or film coming out that you’d like a unique review on from my perspective, please don’t hesitate to contact me for details.
It is estimated than at least 11,500 overseas domestic worker visas are issued to Filipino workers in the UK every year. With perhaps many thousands more already live and work here. And it is already well known that Filipinos are one of the largest ethnic minority groups working as nurses in the NHS – roughly 40,000. To paraphrase Joy in the brand new mystery thriller Raging Grace, many Britons need their help, not the other way round.
Raging Grace, directed by Paris Zarcilla in his first feature length film, shines an eye-opening light on the barriers and struggles some of the Filipinos living in the UK face. And perhaps some of the more extreme and dark situations they may find themselves in. But it’s also a film that explores the turbulence of families, the polar opposites and truths of the wealthy West and the alleged despair in the East, and the exploitation of good nature. If there’s one film you need to end the year (or begin your year) seeing, Raging Grace should be it.
Joy Esposito (Max Eigenmann) is a young migrant who has been living and working as a domestic helper for a number of years, however she has still yet to have a visa. With £15,000 needed to get one through a seemingly dodgy contact, she needs a miracle in order to get her own place and be able to support her young daughter Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla). Thankfully, a chance comes through when she pays a visit to the Garrett mansion, an isolated residence where the elderly and apparently dying man Mr Garrett (David Hayman) lives. Looked after by his snobby, posh niece Katherine (Leanne Best), Joy is quickly offered the job as a the live-in housekeeper for what appears to be a generous sum of £1,000 a week in cash.
While Joy is extremely grateful for the opportunity, she still sneaks Grace into the house and hides her in her room, and is soon a little uneasy by the way Katherine acts about her uncle’s condition, bosses her around and talks to her, often making ignorant remarks about Filipino culture and traditions.
Grace, being the young and playful child she is, can’t help but sneak around the house when the coast is clear, almost getting her and Joy caught, and playing games on people. But her determination, maturity – but also naivety – shows when she raises the alarm about Katherine’s actions and she begins to trust Mr Garrett more than her mother.
It certainly isn’t all it seems, and yet still twists and turns take place throughout the film, upending original suspicions and revealing sinister secrets about both the Garretts and the Espositos. Many of the horror elements are told through hallucinations or nightmares, but as the story snakes along those nightmares soon become reality…
On the outside, Raging Grace is a mysterious horror that embellishes the danger domestic workers – or anyone whose freedom is restricted by someone else – face and the ulterior motives of those who appear to be “in control”. But at its heart, it highlights the maltreatment of foreigners, the policies and politics in place that oppress them, and the attitudes in society that are in need of change. While it may be a very small and perhaps elite minority that have such negative and degrading views of what countries like the Philippines are like and truly believe they are “helping” and emancipating them by giving them work, the reality is that some of them are initially tricked into believing they are coming here for a better life. And many across the world are abused, overworked and underpaid.
A number of reviews of Raging Grace may have criticised the political undertone of the film, but in doing so, do little to help change the political landscape or in the very least societal views that feed into the way Filipinos and other migrants and workers are seen, which is certainly a hot topic right now.
With mesmerising and often haunting music accompanying the scenes – from when Joy and Grace are exploring the house to the more jumpy and darker parts – some of which resemble those of traditional tribal chants and including the closing number Ilay Gandangan by the award-winning Haraya Choir to bring in authentic Filipino culture, Raging Grace sits alongside some of the best known British film productions when it comes to horrors and thrillers. It isn’t over-produced, the storyline is rooted in reality, and the characters are not robbed of their human qualities (be they good or bad).
Although my only small wonderment was why Joy never simply admitted she had a daughter and asked Katherine if she could stay too, which perhaps led to more tiptoeing than was necessary before the first climax happened, it didn’t do much to dampen my wonder at the film itself. Jaeden Paige Boadilla has rightfully been nominated for Best British Young Performer of the Year at the London Critics Circle Film Awards and the film also has several pending nominations at the Catalonian International Film Festival, Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival, British Independent Film Awards (notably for Chi Thai), and others, plus undoubtedly more to come.
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