In the Flesh: Raging Grace

There’s a sick-making tension at the heart of Raging Grace, a cruel, twisting sense of precarity, that any single moment could upend everything undocumented housekeeper and care nurse Joy (Max Eigenmann) is working for. Whether it’s employer Katherine’s (Leanne Best) brittle, reactive micromanagement of Joy or the handful of truly agonizing sequences in which Joy’s daughter, Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla), risks discovery by leaving her mother’s room, there is no relief from the constant, crushing pressure of Joy’s life. Eigenmann is exceptional in the lead role, slipping in and out of the role of cringing domestic servant with disturbing precision. The weight of it is so clearly evident on her shoulders that it has begun to infect her harried daily life, beginning with her decision to keep her daughter hidden from her employers. The tension between mother and daughter is under the circumstances both inevitable and harrowing, helped in no small part by Boadilla’s remarkable debut performance. 

Raging Grace is a small film, built almost entirely around a single location and a core cast of four characters, and director Paris Zarcilla’s trust in his performers is immediately evident. Joy’s heartfelt struggle with balancing her own and her daughter’s future against her deep belief in the Hippocratic Oath she swore upon becoming a nurse is such a confidently paced and stripped-down scene, resting entirely on Eigenmann’s facial acting and a few hurried lines. Zarcilla lets her bring the scene home where a lesser director might move close in on her hands as she strokes the framed copy of the oath, or linger on the squalor of the room she uses as an ersatz storage unit. It’s worth noting here that Zarcilla’s framing and lighting are both beautiful, and that his willingness to show us an image and then linger in silence gives us ample time to soak it in.

There are some pacing issues in the final stretch, a little bit of rushing and piling up, but next to the masterfully executed twist which accompanies Joy’s standing up to her loathsome employer, it’s small potatoes. To take us from the tense, stomach-churning unpleasantness of Katherine’s obvious dysfunction to the well-bred warmth of her uncle, Mr. Garrett (David Hayman), only to flip it over onto us with violent suddenness when he tells Joy he prefers that she call him “Master” is a deviously subtle bit of ugliness. He’s kind and comfortable with Joy and Grace not because he respects them more than Katherine, but because he is utterly convinced of his entitlement to their culture, their affection, and their servitude. The family’s racist exploitation of Filipino labor moves from the general to the personal and paternalistic without a single word of explanation. That’s how you twist the knife.