Sylvie Testud gives such a ferociously controlled performance that the messy murder seems like a necessary release.

| Jun 17, 2013

Unfortunately Denis' detached and indifferent camera never gets inside the story, its characters, or its milieu.

| Jun 17, 2013

The film studies a world of deeply entrenched class divisions and sexual taboos, and then, with a scream in the night, draws the study to a close, leaving its meaning, like that of the case that inspired it, open to interpretation.

| Jun 17, 2013

Julie-Marie Parmentier and Sylvie Testud are eerily convincing as the intense pair of co-dependents in the rigorous but creepy drama Murderous Maids.

Full Review | Jul 6, 2010

Convincingly played, but some way short of revelatory.

| Feb 9, 2006

Never inspires more than an interested detachment.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Aug 18, 2002

Though far from a feel-good affair, it is never cheap or cynical. Its creepiness is well-earned.

| Original Score: B+ | Jul 18, 2002

Testud is the burning center of a clinically dispassionate film.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 12, 2002

Made with spellbinding clarity and tact, shot near the actual locations by an uncompromising cinema realist, and featuring a near-perfect cast.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 20, 2002

An intelligent, moral shocker.

Full Review | Jun 1, 2002

The story makes for an absorbing drama that builds in intensity, heading toward the ultimate outburst with a grim sense of inevitability.

| May 31, 2002

Troubling and powerful.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 31, 2002

As the dominant Christine, Sylvie Testud is icily brilliant.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 31, 2002

What [Denis] 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.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | May 30, 2002

Murderous Maids may well be the most comprehensive of these films and also strike closest to the truth.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 3, 2002

Ultimately too repellent to fully endear itself to American art house audiences, but it is notable for its stylistic austerity and forcefulness.

Full Review | Apr 30, 2002

What Denis ends up with is a delicate psychological portrait in which his grim determination to be restrained and sensitive is the major feature.

| Apr 25, 2002

Denis forges out of the theories of class- based rage and sisterly obsession a razor-sided tuning fork that rings with cultural, sexual and social discord.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 19, 2002

It presents the Papin sisters' lives with ferocious clarity, shedding a painful light on emotions too volatile to be named and on actions that ultimately defy explanation.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 18, 2002

Genuinely unnerving.

Full Review | Apr 16, 2002