Rag­ing Grace review – com­bines right­eous anger with well-exe­cut­ed chills

Joy (Max Eigen­mann) is well aware of the fact that she has to suf­fer in order to keep her head above water as an undoc­u­ment­ed migrant in the UK. Luck­i­ly for her, there are plen­ty of upper-mid­dle class fam­i­lies hap­py to do some cash-in-hand deals for clean­ing ser­vice in order to avoid tax­es or sup­ple­men­tal agency fees. What appeals to the manip­u­la­tive and dom­i­neer­ing Kather­ine (Leanne Best) is the abil­i­ty to make up the rules as she goes along. With a pay pack­et that’s a lit­tle high­er than the norm, Joy glad­ly accepts Katherine’s some­times-eccen­tric requests for tasks that are a lit­tle bit more involved than dust­ing, hoover­ing and cooking.

There are plen­ty of films which adopt the van­tage of the clean­er or the oppressed home help and show how they’re able to get one up on their snooty mas­ters, but Paris Zarcilla’s nifty film is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. This opts instead to rake up the graves of the ghosts of yon­der and explore a wider and, in most cas­es, more vio­lent his­to­ry of exploita­tion that’s a hang­over of Britain’s colo­nial days.

One thing that makes Joy’s life so dif­fi­cult is that she has a young daugh­ter named Grace (Jae­den Paige Boad­il­la) whom she smug­gles into jobs and is only allowed into the open once the boss has left the house. It’s an intrigu­ing set-up which comes to a sur­pris­ing head, and while some of the twists are a lit­tle con­trived, the film as a whole works as a fierce admon­ish­ment of west­ern nos­tal­gia for its colo­nial past.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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