The Maid

A shy, young girl named Rosa (Alessandra de Rossi) gets a position as a maid. She arrives at the house during the seventh month, which, according to legend, is when the "hungry ghosts" are said to walk the Earth.

The family for whom Rosa works seems normal enough. However, she soon learns that her situation isn't quite as simple or safe as it appears to be. Rosa's new employers have a secret that will reveal itself in bizarre, terrifying ways.

THE MAID makes us wonder what is going on, almost until its final frame. A well-made, slow-building, supernatural thriller with a devilish denouement!

A classic creeper from Singapore...

"Every year, for thirty days during the lunar seventh month, the Chinese believe that the gates of hell are thrown open. Vengeful spirits or hungry ghosts wander among the living, seeking revenge and justice before the gates of hell are closed again for another year." The eighteen years old Rosa Dimaano (Alessandra de Rossi) arrives in Singapore from Philippines to give support to her family working as a maid in the house of the artists of a Chinese opera troupe Mr. and Mrs. Teo (Huifang Hong & Shucheng Chen) on the first day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar. She is welcomed by the family and introduced to their friends and their retarded son Ah-Soon (Benny Soh). Later, Mrs. Teo advises her about their beliefs and how the dead should be respected and honored along the seventh month. However, Rosa sweeps their offer on the sidewalk breaking a basic rule and offending the spirits, and she is haunted by ghosts everywhere. When Ah-Soon calls her Esther Santos and she finds some belongings of the unknown Esther in the house, she discloses a dark and scary secret about the past of her masters.

"The Maid" is an original, scary and very-well constructed ghost story based on a Chinese superstition. The screenplay introduces with an explanation about the seventh month of the lunar calendar, and Mrs. Teo explains the rules to be accomplished to Rosa, giving the big picture about the theme to the viewers like me that are not familiarized with this tradition. I startled many times with the creepy ghosts, and the scene when Rosa is watching the presentation of the troupe sat in the middle of the spirits is really frightening. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "O Sétimo Mês" ("The Seventh Month")

It's not that difficult to understand why The Maid was successful during its run at the local theatres, and have garnered international attention. I did not catch the movie when it premiered in the theatres (that's another story for another day), but one of the many reasons/excuses I had was that the horror genre of late from Asia were usually laughable efforts, with mediocre story lines, sometimes bordering on the ludicrous.

Not that The Maid didn't have its fair share, but somehow it was tolerable, and actually tried to tell a decent story, which I enjoyed. While some might say it's influences have come from movies like The Sixth Sense and Ju-on, I thought it was a decent effort for our current generation of directors to have spun a yarn from the horror genre, currently monopolized by the Japanese and the Koreans. Curiosity about the effort locally had me borrowing this DVD, and I shall unabashedly say I'd enjoy every moment of it, though not without some gripes of course.

The premise is set entirely during the Lunar Seventh Month, which is the month where the Chinese believe the denizens from Hell are released for their holiday on Earth, where they can roam around, and spook folks who do not observe the rules. Rules like not returning home late, not stepping on offerings, not turning back when someone calls you out, and so on. The Maid, seen through the eyes of domestic worker Rosa Dimano (the very beautiful Alessandra de Rossi from The Philippines), introduces audiences and refreshes those familiar with the strange customs, about the do's and the don'ts.

New to Singapore, her employment comes from an elderly couple, the Teos (television veterans Chen Shu Cheng and Hong Hui Fang), who head a Teochew opera troupe. While the Hokkien dialect has made its fair exposure in local cinema thanks to Jack Neo movies, it's refreshing to hear the Teochew language being the lingua franca of choice in the movie. It doesn't take long for Rosa to violate some of the unwritten laws, and therefore, she starts to experience things that go bump in the day and night.

Yup, strange things happen in the day as well, which I find peculiar. Anyway, be it in limited lighting, or broad daylight, the cinematography by Lucas Jodoigne was beautiful, and probably added a positive dimension to the overall feel of the movie, as did the art director Daniel Lim. Were there moments of disappointment? You bet, and the major one is with the spirits themselves. They just stand around doing nothing! Despite relying on the usual tricks up the sleeves of horror filmmakers, like the passing shadows, musical crescendos, creaking furniture, and close up fast cuts, the technique used never go beyond that, and the spirits just hang around. What gives? Some editing needed to be tightened as certain scenes were inserted without much thought to narrative flow, and looked a bit out of place as a transitional scene.

That said, I'm still of the opinion that Kelvin Tong's The Maid has its niched appeal, and more importantly, cemented his ability to make commercial films that can be enjoyed by the masses. If his Love Story had put me off, The Maid had shown what he is capable of, besides his debut with Eating Air, which I also enjoyed.

The visual transfer is decently done, and allows for details to be seen even in scenes with little lighting, rather than becoming all black. The colours were vibrant during the opera scenes, while maintaining the dull atmosphere of the Teo family. English and Mandarin subtitles are available, though for the first 2 minutes of the film where there was a dialect voice-over, somehow the much needed translation explaining some Seventh Month superstition was missed. While subtitling was good, there were some noticeable grammatical errors in the beginning.

You're given a choice of either Dolby Digital 2.0 or 5.1, so depending on how spooked you want to be when the music by Joe Ng and Alex Oh comes on, you might want to tweak it for that surround sound capability.

The Code 3 DVD by Scorpio East comes with the standard offerings like scene selections, and contain special features like the 1min 55s theatrical trailer, as well as the Making Of, with both English and Mandarin subtitles. containing interviews with the principle cast, Kelvin Tong the writer-director, and Daniel Yun, executive producer.

Running 22 minutes, there's a decent amount of information revealed on the art direction, and some behind the scenes look during shooting, where I thought a scene showing the cast having a heck of a time dancing during their break, was hilarious.

A horror story about a maid in Singapore? We've heard quite a few, but in this one instead of a horrified Ma'am, it is the maid who is standing at the gates of hell. And unfortunately they are wide open.

Rosa Dimaano (Alessandra De Rossi) is a trusting, pretty Filipina orphan who comes to Singapore to see the world. But it is the start of the lunar seventh month, Hungry Ghost time, and the world is a place of confusing and jarring chaos. Ignorance is no protection and Rosa inevitably offends "something" and soon she is seeing ghosts and having nightmares. Her only happiness is playing with her employers' simple son, Ah Soon (Benny Soh), but to be honest this is hardly a relief as he is also really spooky.

Rosa's employers - a solitary chain smoking artist (Chen Shu Cheng) and an unpredictably tempered dressmaker (Hong Hui Fang) - live in a near derelict shophouse, cluttered with Wayang costumes, creaking cupboards and glowering pictures of the ancestors. Add a failing electricity supply, no telephone or TV and Rosa is absolutely alone in her misery. Or is she? From "The" Title to the twisting joints and/or heads of creepy kids, crawling long-haired wide-eyed zombies, blurring of identities, burnt photos, unprovoked suicides, the proliferation of grabbing-stalking-glaring-weeping-hanging ghosts and even the scorpions, this is a tribute to Asian horror. All the traditional, requisite and much loved scares are here and impossible to miss thanks to a heavy hand on the violin (think amplified Hitchcock).

Though regularly repetitive (especially by the nth explanation of the state of things during the seventh month) and disjointed, The Maid does not suffer from a lack of substance. No doubt this year we will all be more careful about kicking along the ash-ridden pavement and sitting in the front row of the Chinese opera.

Sometimes they got it, while other times they sink. That's how I feel about some of the modern ghost features coming out of Asia. 'The Maid' mostly falls in with the former. Yeah it's formulaic by your usual standards, but the low-budgeted slow-burn Singapore entry is sleekly directed with a strong enough platform for the story to open up upon and add some refreshing details to the predictable mixture.

A young maid arrives in Singapore to help out the Teo family, who own an Opera troupe. Her arrival goes hand-to-hand with that of the seventh month known as the hungry ghost month. Soon she's seeing ghosts, and the Teo's are worried she's done something to upset them for this to happen. However she learns that she has a striking resemblance to the previous maid who worked with the family, before she disappeared.

The execution of the premise isn't as good, as it sounds on paper. The concept behind the plot is actually more curious than that of the linear background story about a family with a secret, which when let out is intensely harrowing if customary. The Chinese customs and believes about the gates of hell opening up for vengeful, hungry spirits to wander among the living seeking closure or revenge in the seventh month of the lunar calendar is ideally enthralling and creepy.

Director Kelvin Tong compositional work and placement is a stand-out. Cold, gloomy and haunting imagery is beautifully catered for and Lucas Jodogne's presentable cinematography streamlines the rundown, sapping urban backdrop. The darkness lurking within every alienating corner is shared in the characters' state of minds. Heart-ache, denial and just like the protagonist (wholesomely acted by Alessandra De Rossi) we're left plunged in the dark and distressed by the revelations. The evocative music is skin crawling, as the sound effects have quite a chilling imprint when they break up the silence and terse script with sudden pitches. Some high-strung shocks are foreseeable and shadowy figures flashing by can only do so much. Chen Shu-cheng and Hong Hui-fang deliver rewardingly strong performances.