My initial sense of wonder was concerning its title: Raging Grace. Why Raging Grace? Why NOT Raging Joy (sounds like a paradox in itself)? Joy is, whom we're made to believe, the protagonist of this story. And for the most part, she is. An illegal Filipina immigrant in the UK who works mostly as a caretaker (slash) house-help, Joy's story has several layers. For starters, she's also a single mother, and the father of her child is shown to be an abusive employer. Joy (Max Eigenmann) and her daughter Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla) have secrets of their own. Sometimes, Joy sneaks Grace into her employers' homes when they're away. Joy is trying to become documented, and she has to pay off a reasonably large sum of money to get this done. Joy and Grace switch between English and Tagalog while conversing. Joy's discomfort of being looked down upon by rich British employers and frequently addressed using the wrong terms ("you people!") is evident early on.
When Joy lands a job as a housekeeper at a mansion with an old man in a coma and her niece, she sees it as an opportunity to come clean and eventually secure their own place of residence. The setup is ripe. The performances are riveting. The film seamlessly moves into its second act, where what begins as a fairly straightforward set of tasks for Joy, slowly builds suspense, and inadvertently, a sense of psychological horror. The house harbors even bigger secrets, and they start to unfurl one after the other. Some of the plot developments seem predictable, but there's always a neat flow from scene to scene. Director Paris Zarcilla also crafts a tense little atmosphere within the house, and given that a large chunk of the film takes place inside of it, the filmmaker exhibits decent control over the staging of sequences.
The final act, while turning into a "who's the greater evil?" narrative, also reinstates why Grace is the film's protagonist. It's interesting, even if the proceedings lack the steam and momentum of the earlier acts. The "horror" then stops being subtle and suddenly becomes very in-your-face, very real. This does take away some of its storytelling glory, which otherwise, would've ended up being one of the smartest immigrant horror films in recent times.
