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France · 2000
1h 34m
Director Jean-Pierre Denis
Starring Julie-Marie Parmentier, Sylvie Testud, Isabelle Renauld, François Levantal
Genre Drama
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Christine and Léa Papin are sisters with an already troubled past. Madame Lancelin takes them into her home and employs the girls as maids. But their wretched background — an indifferent mother and drunken, abusive father — casts a shadow over the girls and over time their ill-fated situation darkens. The sisters withdraw into themselves and finish by committing the worst — killing Madame Lancelin and her daughter after six years of service, on the 2 February 1933 in Le Mans.
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May ultimately be no more than the sum of its (body) parts, but it's still a ghastly service-industry horror story - a film to make you wonder what might be roiling beneath the surface of the placid young woman who hands you your Grande Latte every morning.
Philadelphia Inquirer by Carrie Rickey
Director Jean-Pierre Denis doesn't explore psychological motives, which are, finally, unknowable. What he accomplishes in his chilling, unnerving film is a double portrait of two young women whose lives were as claustrophic, suffocating and chilly as the attics to which they were inevitably consigned.
Julie-Marie Parmentier is fetching as the vulnerable younger sister, and the duo generate considerable erotic tension; unfortunately Denis' detached and indifferent camera never gets inside the story, its characters, or its milieu.
New Times (L.A.) by Jean Oppenheimer
The film proves unrelentingly grim -- and equally engrossing.
Doesn't shy away from the social or psychological explanations of the Le Mans murders, but never comes down on one side or another.
Nearly 75 years after the fact, the matter still hasn't given up all its secrets, but Denis' film comes close to a definitive, deeply disturbing account.
Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas
Denis and Testud, in a wondrous collaboration of a gifted director and equally gifted actress, succeed in making Christine a tragic figure.
San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle
The old saying, "It's hard to find good help nowadays" takes on a new meaning in Murderous Maids.
New York Magazine (Vulture) by Peter Rainer
Sylvie Testud gives such a ferociously controlled performance that the messy murder seems like a necessary release.
Washington Post by Stephen Hunter
The movie avoids sensationalism. What it requires and what it delivers is performance.
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