Hoping to help her destitute family and dying brother, young, innocent, Filipino Rosa (Alessandra De Rossi) has taken a job as a maid in Singapore with the Teo family. They are kind, though Mr. Teo is distant and Mrs. Teo is domineering. Their twenty-year-old son, Ah Soon (Benny Soh) is mentally retarded and likes Rosa a bit too much. It is the seventh month, a time when the locals believe ghosts walk the streets and special precautions must be taken. Rosa doesn’t know the rules, and apparently offends the spirits. Soon, she is seeing ghosts everywhere. What do the ghosts want, and is their any connection to a previous maid who disappeared?
Advertised as Singapore’s first horror film (and I have no reason to doubt it), The Maid shames the old pros and shows that new blood is always desirable. It’s also the most accessible Asian horror film anyone from the Americas or Europe is likely to stumble upon since it doesn’t require any pre-knowledge of the society to get all the nuances. Rosa isn’t any more familiar with Singapore than the average Westerner. The temples, rituals, and dangers are all new to her, and if anything doesn’t fit in with normal behavior, neither she, nor the viewer, recognize that until it is too late. We enter the story with her, and learn as she does.
The Maid has been advertised, and described by critics, as an Eastern take on The Sixth Sense, and that’s at least partly true. Rosa does see dead people, but it isn’t considered weird to do so. When she tells this to the Teos, they don’t doubt her or suggest that she’s psychotic. Instead, they tell her that’s she’s done something to upset the ghosts. Everyone either sees ghosts or accepts their existence. The sidewalks are filled nightly with families burning sacrifices to their ancestors. Seats are left vacant in the front row of the theater for the ghosts, and everyone knows not to turn back if your name is called at night. This is The Sixth Sense if Cole has said, “I see dead people” and Malcolm had replied, “Yeah, who doesn’t. I’m pretty sure my deceased folks are at the show tonight. Now, let’s discover your real problem.”
There are plenty of minor scares and a great deal of tension, all related to isolation. Rosa is alone and helpless in a country she doesn’t understand, with what are to her, bizarre customs. She has no one she can talk to and very few options. The fear isn’t of things that go bump in the night, particularly after we learn that there are things bumping around everywhere and they do little harm, but of being powerless.
Heightening Rosa’s solitude, while making the film easier for English speakers, is language. Her native tongue is Filipino (or Tagalog) while everyone around her speaks a dialect of Chinese. To communicate, they must use a language that no one is at home with: English. About half of the movie is in English; the rest is subtitled.
Western critics, mainly American, have unfairly maligned The Maid, first for being too much like Ju-on, and then for not being enough like it. Connecting the two films is absurd. You might as well compare The Maid to The Seven Samurai, since both have many Asian people and not everyone lives. Before claiming The Maid is derivative of Ju-on, you need to throw up your hands and declare that the Orient is a strange place you don’t understand and all films from there look the same. As for it not being enough like Japan’s champion fright fest, the complaint is that The Maid isn’t as scary. No kidding. The terror in Ju-on comes from an unreasoning, unstoppable force that devours anyone who is unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The much lesser frights here involve being alone and not understanding what is happening.
The Maid is one of the best #-horror films of the last seven years. The acting is flawless, the cinematography bounces between acceptable and beautiful, and the culture is fascinating. The story is one of the strongest in recent ghost movies, and while it isn’t too taxing to figure out the ending, chances are you’ll be too involved with the characters to try. Things do drag in the middle, with a scene too many of sweeping, but the ghosts rev things back up.
The Tartan DVD (which has an irrelevant long-haired ghost picture on the cover) has issues with the aspect ratio. If you have a standard 4×3 TV, you’ll need to change the settings on your player to widescreen or the picture will appear stretched.