The drama is masterfully done and exquisitely played...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 10, 2021

The film on its most meaningful level is acid splashed into the wound of class distinction. But it is best enjoyed simply as a slick, spooky, frequently spellbinding study of corruption.

| Apr 8, 2020

Even at his worst Losey is never dull, and here he is pretty consistently at his best.

| Apr 8, 2020

The viewer is left with not only a portrait of the haves and the have-nots, but a glimpse of what such social stratification provokes -- an all-consuming madness as powerful as it is hidden.

| Apr 8, 2020

Losey does masterly work in confined spaces, and Bogarde's performance as the scheming servant sets the standard for sly corruption.

| Apr 8, 2020

With Losey exiled from America by the Hollywood blacklist, and Pinter the bristling voice of young London, the film has the glee of outsiders mid-gatecrash.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 8, 2020

Glaciers might be melting, the polar caps might be crumbling, but not even the passage of half a century has taken the frozen edge off this brilliantly icy film.

| Aug 29, 2013

A perfect storm of perversity, pre-Persona identity transference, prole pole-positioning and mutually assured psychological destruction, Joseph Losey's masterpiece immediately transformed the director from has-been Hollywood exile to European auteur.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 23, 2013

The film's sidelong narrative glances suggest a privileged world brimming with innuendo-laden excess and barely concealed sexual jealousies.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 22, 2013

Claustrophobic film-making carries a charge it's not easy to forget. Only Pinter could match it.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 22, 2013

It is a brilliant, subversive account of class relations and the changing times.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 21, 2013

Losey's use of off-kilter camera angles and an ornamental convex mirror helps to emphasise the stifling architecture of the building while offering eerie portents of things to come.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 21, 2013

The Servant is for the most part strong dramatic fare, though the atmosphere and tension is not fully sustained to the end.

| Jul 16, 2008

Certainly difficult to define, this period piece messes with genres, power relationships and your head.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 30, 2006

The performances are note-perfect and Pinter's script is smart, subversive and sly, lifting the lid on our age-old feudal hierarchy and having a good dig about inside.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 24, 2006

It is a flesh-creeping demonstration of human destructiveness that Mr. Pinter and Mr. Losey are presenting in this film, and it is made all the more horrifying by the genteel surroundings in which it occurs.

| May 20, 2003

The film is very studied and smooth, even though it deals in sexual hysteria; it could use some of the roughness and drive of Losey's early work.

| Jan 1, 2000