La Nana (Sebastián Silva, 2009)

Those who've seen this year's Best Foreign Language Oscar winner Roma will be struck at once by how much it shares with The Maid, which came out nine years earlier. The lead character is a live-in maid for a wealthy family in a Latin American country (here, Chile). But there are also significant differences. Unlike the sweetly compliant Cleo in Cuarón's film, Raquel here is sullenly truculent and gets paranoid when the family decide that she needs someone to help her with her never-ending workload of chores. Her reaction is then to try to get rid of each successive arrival through various hostile acts of increasing irrationality. It doesn't exactly make you warm to her, but then that's the principal tonal difference between this film and its Mexican successor: she's not meant to be liked, just understood. As such, where Roma was poetic and also set against a real unstable political environment, The Maid is as messy and mundane as life, and the society it plays in hardly gets a look in. It's a very different beast, but doesn't stand up badly at all in the comparison.

7/10