La Ceremonie (1995)

The wife (Jacqueline Bisset) of an upper class bourgeois French family hires a new maid (Sandrine Bonnaire). What she doesn't know is that the maid is illiterate and suspected of murdering her father. When the maid is befriended by a bitter sociopath (Isabelle Huppert), the combination of the two proves lethal ..... and fatal to the family. Based on the novel A JUDGEMENT IN STONE by Ruth Rendell and directed by Claude Chabrol (LE BOUCHER). Rendell's novel (which had previously been made in 1987 as THE HOUSEKEEPER) was inspired by the notorious case of the Pepin sisters who murdered their employers in 1933. It also served as the inspiration of Jean Genet's play THE MAIDS. As to LA CEREMONIE, it's an excellent piece of film making. It works as both a political commentary on the class system and it works as a pure crime thriller. Having said that, I found it a most unpleasant experience to sit through. The family may be bourgeois but they're decent people while the two perpetrators are pure sociopaths. While I understand the movie has a point, I found it pointless in the sense that the film doesn't provide any insight into the psychological aspect of the two killers. It's senseless but perhaps that's the point. With Jean Pierre Cassel and Virginie Ledoyen.