Raging Grace (3 Stars)

This is the 27th film in the Stuttgart Fantasy Film Festival.

Joy is an illegal immigrant from the Philippines who lives in London. She's a trained nurse, but without a visa the best job she can get is as a cleaner. She has a young daughter called Grace, who's intelligent but mischievous. She's offered a visa for £15,000. It's almost certainly illegal, but it will look realistic enough to fool the authorities. The trouble is that she only has £10,000 and she has to get the visa within a month.

Joy considers theft, but when she enters a stately home she's offered a job as a maid for £1,000 per week. It's better than she could have hoped for. She thinks she won't get the job if she says that she has a daughter, so she hides Grace in her room. But there are sinister things happening in the house. She's told that the owner is about to die, but her training as a nurse tells her that he's being given medication to make him ill.

The film begins very slowly. For the first 45 minutes it's so slow that I had to ask myself what the point of the film is. After that it speeds up and develops into a gripping horror story.