Critics reviews

Engrossing... Avilés’s [is a] much grittier work [than Cuarón's Roma, and it] leans more toward the interiority of the lonely, guarded title character... Cinematographer Carlos Rossini, [in turn,] brings a verite, off-the-cuff feel to his images of hotel bustle while also exploiting the possibilities of the stationary camera.

This is brilliantly confident film-making. Avilés does not need to leave the building to examine class tensions and cultural misunderstandings, weaving her critique through the hotel’s denizens

There’s something refreshing about the calmness of Lila Aviles’s film... [The Chambermaid] has just enough of a story to give you a sense of her life and a desire to see her happy. And that’s all you need in a film as crisp and observant as this one.

The film may feel minimalist to those accustomed to watching mighty heroes save the world and whatnot, but there’s an intricacy to all the seemingly mundane details Avilés opts to include, and a photographic instinct behind the way she composes each scene... Thanks to [her] incredibly patient and empathetic film, we do [see Eve, too] — a lesson likely to transform the way we perceive an entire category of our fellow humans.

The Chambermaid captures the essence of Eve’s panic. You don’t pity her, you empathise with her, to the extent that when she finally escapes the confines of the hotel, your own lungs are thrown into a quandary.

Avilés, making a remarkable feature debut, brings us a study of work that has an exacting purity... The film could sentimentalise [Eve's] predicament but doesn’t: it respects her ruthless practicality and need to keep her job... As a portrait of this, [The Chambermaid is] close to perfect.

Eerily atmospheric, poignant, [and] disquieting... Avilés elegantly conveys her fascination with the uncanny spaces of the modern hotel and, like Kubrick in The Shining, intuits that all hotels are haunted: they are public yet private.

Every now and then, one is taken aback to discover the unlikely source material for a film. Lila Avilés has adapted her excellent, highly original [The Chambermaid] from her own stage play... [Yet] no trace of the literary or theatrical remains in [the director's] long takes and snatched, blank dialogue. The picture wraps a whole world around us.

Well crafted though it is, there’s a nagging sense that [The Chambermaid is] not saying anything particularly revelatory with regard to class exploitation and the daily struggles of those toiling in the modern service industry... Yet this is still a complete and intelligently executed work which leaves enough open for the viewer to fill in some intriguing blanks.

Avilés’s debut film is hardly voyeuristic. It is instead an intimate look at the unseen labor of a young woman whose stirrings of desire and hope bump up against a difficult reality.

With her film, Avilés unlocks a world full of hope and disappointment, a workday that may bring peril or boredom. It may feel less epic in scale [than "Roma"], but “The Chambermaid” is just as emotionally potent and perhaps even more successful at questioning the power dynamics of a workplace that has lost its sense of compassion.

Marvelously honest... Marked by magnificent restraint and naturalistic humanity, Cartol’s construction of Eve is the work of an acting giant given the chance to leisurely develop real life from the page. The Mexican actress does much more than honor a thankless position; she bears the weight of an entire production where her ability to communicate unvarnished emotions without overdramatizing is the story’s foundation.