A young employee wafts from room to room in this disquieting story of the unseen servant class maintaining a five-star hotel
Lila Avilés is the Mexican actor-turned-director who makes a terrifically assured feature debut with The Chambermaid: an eerily atmospheric, poignant, disquieting movie about 21st-century luxury and the invisible servant class required to maintain it. It is a film to put alongside Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, in that it’s about the emotional cost of submission.
Working with co-screenwriter Juan Carlos Marquéz, Avilés has adapted her own stage play, which was inspired by the 1981 photographic installation project The Hotel by artist Sophie Calle. Avilés elegantly conveys her fascination with the uncanny spaces of the modern hotel and, like Kubrick in The Shining, intuits that all hotels are haunted: they are public yet private. Each room, inscrutably blank and interchangeable, withholds the truth from the freshly checked-in guest about the many people that have been in there before, all their drama, their sadness, their excitements, their bodily fluids, have been erased; and the evidence of the incomer’s existence will in turn be expunged before the next customer. Of course, these rooms withhold another truth about the labourers who have vacated the scene; the maids will discreetly flee like spectres from the guests, vanishing into service elevators at their approach.
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