Right, well I must say that when I stumbled upon the 2020 Thai horror movie "The Maid", of course there was no doubt about me having to sit down to watch it. I do enjoy horror movie and Asian cinema quite a lot.
And while "The Maid" definitely was watchable, it was just a movie that was all over the place and left too many unanswered questions. So I have to say that what writers Lee Thongkham and Piyaluk Tuntisrisakul were thinking here when they concocted the script for "The Maid", well that is just somewhat beyond me.
The movie starts out well enough, promising to be a regular and good old fashioned horror movie. Sure, you have your obligatory jump scares and semi-typical Asian ghost wandering around. But then the movie takes two turns along the way, and not necessarily for the better.
Now, the whole thing with the monkey just makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. That is something that just went above and beyond my comprehension. Especially since it served no particular purpose to the movie, aside from adding a bit of confusion and bizarre feel to the story.
And the movie does take a strange turn from being a supernatural horror movie to becoming a downright blood-soaked slasher movie, for better or worse. Sure, I enjoyed this particular change of events, but in the contents of the story and the narrative, then it was a very strange and very sudden change.
I will say that I do like the story. There are some very nice elements to the storyline, despite of it being flawed and feeling like it was all over the place.
The acting in the movie was good, and they had some good acting talents to star in the movie to portray the characters in the storyline. Ploy Sornarin (playing Joy), Savika Chaiyade (playing Uma) and Kannaporn Puangtong (playing Ploy) definitely carried the movie rather well.
Visually then "The Maid" had some good things going on. It was rather nicely filmed and had a very aesthetic feel to it. The props and costumes were good, and it felt like you were right there alongside the cast most of the time. And the special effects - mostly the blood and gore - were definitely pleasing to an old gorehound such as myself.
"The Maid" feels like director Lee Thongkham's attempt to throw a couple of different genres together and mashing it up for the ultimate horror movie. But it just didn't really work out all that great in favor of the movie.
I am rating "The Maid" a less than mediocre four out of ten stars. Had the movie been kept to one path and one genre, instead of being all over the place and at times making very little or no sense, then the movie would have been rated higher. "The Maid" is definitely watchable, but it was by no means a grand moment in Thai horror cinema.
