Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Raging Grace’ on Paramount+, a Gem of a Suspense-Thriller That Keenly Balances Comedy and Social Commentary

Raging Grace (now streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime) won the grand jury award at SXSW in 2023, and it’s easy to see why. The debut feature from director Paris Zarcilla is a provocative and socially conscious thriller with a horror fringe that would make Hitchcock himself raise a proud eyebrow. It’s the story of an undocumented Filipino immigrant who’s so desperately trying to keep her young daughter safe and fed, she doesn’t see that a too-good-to-be-true job opportunity is in fact a massive can of worms, and, as these things inevitably work, there’s no putting the lid back on once they’re all wriggling free all willy-nilly and such.

RAGING GRACE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open with a JUMP SCARE, hello there! Joy (Max Eigenmann) is asleep under a pile of blankets and pillows on a couch, and she has a tendency to awake rather suddenly. Bad dreams. Likely a side effect of the anxiety. She and her eight-or-10-ish-year-old daughter Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla) are homeless. Joy’s a housecleaner who quietly squats in her employers’ swanky homes when they’re away. She meets with a broker, likely shady, who’s trying to secure her a visa, but she’s £5k short of the £15k she needs. “Why do you people always do this?” the broker asks, and it’s not the last time we’ll hear that you people, and considering Joy is an undocumented not-White person, it’s probably, conservative estimate, about the zillionth time she’s heard it.  

Adding to Joy’s stress: Grace is rebellious, and you wonder if her mean little pranks – sneaking gravy into the teapot, for instance – are an extension of her frustration with her mother, or a little bit of eat-the-rich mischief for when the moneyed (and almost certainly White) folk come home and sit down for a cuppa and some casual racism. Both could be true, of course. From the looks of it, their chaotic, anti-sedentary lifestyle means Grace isn’t going to school or interacting with peers or doing much normal-kid stuff. It’s just survival survival survival, so it’s no surprise that she’s acting out and making her mother’s life more difficult than it already is. 

You can’t help but feel for the poor kid, and that’s before Joy quite literally crams Grace into a suitcase. Having a kid could be a liability when you have to take them to work with you, and Joy doesn’t want to risk the plum gig she just landed. She hauls the suitcase up to a massive country manor, and one look at the place has us invoking the OG Amityville-slash-Jordan Peele exhortation: get… out! Please note the word choice: it’s no ordinary ol’ mansion, but a gothic thing with more vibes than rooms, and it has a whole lotta f—ing rooms. Hence, manor. 

So here’s the sitch. A haughty you-know-what, Katherine (Leanne Best), hires Grace to clean up the place, which is full of creepy portraits and antique furniture, all draped with dusty plastic and sheets. Grace will also help care for Katherine’s ancient, ailing uncle, Mr. Garrett (David Hayman), who’s essentially comatose in bed. Her first impulse upon seeing him is to clasp her hands and pray for him – and then his barely-awake hand reaches out and GRABS her. The place is so huge, Joy gets her own bedroom, and it’d be easy for Grace to remain undetected if she’d just stay hidden inside the wardrobe, which she never, ever does of course. (You don’t know whether to be amused or empathize with Joy’s anxious frustration.) Katherine has to go away for a few days, so Joy gets a break from the exhausting condescension, and Grace can wander – wander into Mr. Garrett’s room and discover that his niece has been drugging him, which sure looks like some damn foul play, doesn’t it? This is when we learn that Joy used to be a nurse, and took an oath, and can’t just let this situation stay asleep in its bed with a feeding tube up its nose. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: With Grace scampering around and hiding in the mansion while we grit our teeth (and laugh, more than just a little) hoping Katherine doesn’t notice, and the upstairs-downstairs kind of dynamic, you can’t help but think about Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite. And it explores some similar class-divide stuff that Saltburn was too unfocused and self-interested to address with any clarity. 

Performance Worth Watching: Eigenmann is a rock-solid protagonist, and makes it impossible not to feel Joy’s guts get tied in a knot from all the stress. It’s also sort of a spoiler to say that Hayman gives a performance that’s more than just being an almost-dead-body, but we have to note how he steals a few scenes as the story unravels.  

Memorable Dialogue: One mispronounced word, culled from a moronic sentence dribbling out the mouth of one of Joy’s idiot rich employers: “Filipeenees.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: There’s no denying Zarcilla’s ambition: Raging Grace finds significant dramatic traction in both the personal and the political, and the big, messy, complicated area where the two overlap in their Venn diagram. There’s a moment where Joy is so on edge that we hear her stomach gurgling, then gurgling again, then she dashes to the bathroom, and it’s a throwaway moment with no greater meaning than to make her highly relatable to those of us who’ve experience stress of such an intensity that it manifests in physical discomfort. Which is to say, all of us. And I don’t mean to be overly glib, or to gloss over the film’s critical depiction of privilege or racial disparity, but having an upset gut during a moment of high anxiety is one of the things that makes us human. It’s loose poop as the great uniter.

I apologize for the blunt imagery. But this is relevant in a story where our protagonist is treated as a lesser-than, especially by Katherine, who’s so insistent that Joy call her Katherine instead of ma’am, that the formality of such forced informality is a reminder of everyone’s place around here, and that everyone should stay in that place, especially if one is the controller and one is the controllee. Such details reveal that Zarcilla has intention beyond paying lip service to the struggles of immigrants, or trying to exploit the cliches of horror-thrillers that flirt with the supernatural; writing Joy as a woman of significant faith not only opens the door to a logical indulgence of ghostly imagery, but also shows a wily confluence of character depth, cultural specificity and classic Hitchcockian thriller tropes.

This isn’t to say Raging Grace is airtight – Zarcilla’s use of jump scares, it’s-just-a-dream-(or-is-it?) sequences and monologuing villains verge ever-so-slightly on hackiness. But his tone is never dead-serious; he’s playful, inferring that we can be amused and entertained – especially by the wily puckishness of young Boadilla’s performance – as we absorb insights about the immigrant experience. The film is shrewdly directed, intelligent and entertaining, from a director who knows how to play his audience’s nerves like a piano, and its funny bone like an idiophone.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Raging Grace is a gem. More from Zarcilla, please. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.