Raging Grace Review | Terror in the Margins

Raging Grace, the finely tuned first feature from writer-director Paris Zarcilla, takes the sort of grounded and pervasive fears faced by migrant and immigrant workers on a daily basis and grafts them onto a genuinely suspenseful tale of paranormal intrigue. Raging Grace manages to succeed at frightening the viewer and keeping them on edge because it places them into a very realistic and fraught mindset, full of real world consequences that are just as scary as running afoul of any ghosts, monsters, or demons. The horror films that hold the biggest, lasting cultural impact hold a mirror up to society, and Raging Grace (which understandably won several awards at SXSW this year) does it better than most.

Joy (Max Eigenmann) is an undocumented Filipina immigrant and single mother desperately trying to purchase UK citizenship documents for herself and her daughter, Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla). Getting that paperwork and some semblance of legal status could give Joy and Grace some stability, as they currently live job to job, living in the homes of housecleaning clients who’ve gone away on holiday. With a major deadline looming over her head, Joy takes a job filling in for a friend, which turns out to be more than she could’ve ever expected. Joy is hired by the niece (Leanne Best) of a bedridden businessman (David Hayman) suffering from a terminal disease. The cash payout is great, and as long as she can keep Grace a secret, the job means free room and board for the foreseeable future. But once Joy starts caring for the old man, it becomes abundantly clear that something is off about her new clients, and that her daughter might be in danger.

Raging Grace works wonders because Zarcilla makes sure that the fear of being discovered – a real danger faced by undocumented peoples around the world – is just as palpably terrifying as the eventual shift towards more traditional gothic horror territory. The depiction of Joy on the margins of society feels appropriately intense and chaotic. She puts up with leering creeps and cheap racists looking to exploit her labour. Every day is filled with close calls and near misses that go hand in hand with being discovered squatting, something that isn’t helped by young Grace’s love for pranks and scaring her mother. One moment, an employer can hail Joy as a godsend, the next belittle her as being worthless trash that could be lucky for what little she has. It’s far from an ideal life for someone who already wakes up in a panic every morning.

This tension is compounded once Joy begins to suspect that the old man she has been tasked with caring for might be held captive by something sinister. Her religious faith and cultural upbringing pushes Joy to try and make things better, but she might only be making things worse for everyone involved in the long run. The overall societal and cultural implications make the mystery surrounding what’s going on in this posh estate all the more intriguing. There’s plenty of subtext to be found in Zarcilla’s direction and story, but there’s a nice balance between the obvious and the subversive. 

Zarcilla makes the most of the film’s limited budget by imbuing the material with plenty of thought and intelligence, and he gets plenty of assistance from the wonderful performances by Eigenmann and young Boadilla. Zarcilla masterfully unleashes a handful of jarring jump scares and unique scene transitions with editing and staging that requires sometimes pinpoint accuracy that’s wholly admirable. The score, while certainly effective and befitting of the overall mood, can be employed with a slightly lighter touch, but that’s the only minor weak point to be found in this otherwise captivating thriller. Raging Grace is unquestionably one of the smartest and most welcome genre surprises of the year.

Raging Grace is now available on VOD.