Mark Reviews Movies: THE CHAMBERMAID

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 4, 2019

The camera never leaves the hotel in The Chambermaid, because, for all intents and purposes, Eve (Gabriela Cartol) never does, either. She's a maid at an upscale hotel in Mexico City. She is also 24 and a single mother, who lives a long bus ride away from the city in a home without a shower. None of that really matters when Eve is at work, except for the fact that the lack of a shower at home means more time spent at the hotel, where there are showers for the employees.

Co-writer/director Lila Avilés' debut feature presents only Eve's work life, since her work means that she really has no chance for any kind of life outside of it. She works all day and most of the night. By the time she's ready to go home, her 4-year-old son is likely asleep, and by the time the boy's awake, Eve is likely heading out or about to head out the door to return to her job. Even if the film left the tall and expansive but oppressive confines of the hotel in order to show Eve at home, we imagine there wouldn't be much to see.

Instead, Avilés and Juan Carlos Marquéz's screenplay follows the day-to-day routines and the brief moments of breaking from them. More to the point, it's about the ways in which small promises—a possible promotion, a red dress that a guest left behind, an Argentinian guest who suggests Eve should move with her own child to become the woman's full-time nanny, a class for getting her GED—are the only glimmers of hope that something might come of this working-to-live and living-to-work existence.

As such, not much happens in the story, but that's of little concern. The central focus is observing how the routine has come to define Eve and how each promise—made and inevitably broken in some way—helps her to realize how trapped she is by that restricted definition of her life.

Cartol's performance is masterful in how much she communicates about the character's mounting frustrations without saying much, and over the course of The Chambermaid, Avilés creates a fascinating world—filled with mundane politics and tenuous relationships and betrayals—out of the behind-the-scenes operations of the hotel. We come to understand it, not solely as a job, but as an elaborate trap.

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