The obvious horrors of apartheid South Africa — the sectarian violence, the legal enforcement of people of colour’s subhuman status, and the day-to-day living in a prejudiced, stratified country — aren’t literally portrayed in Good Madam. Director Jenna Cato Bass plays with their absence, she lets them scream silently in the background so they’re always on your mind.
The story itself concerns a financially vulnerable and socially isolated Black mother, Tsidi (Chumisa Cosa), who takes her child Winnie (Kamvalethu Jonas Raziya) into the home of a wealthy but infirm white woman, where her estranged mother Mavis (Nosipho Mtebe) is a caretaker. The oppressive atmosphere in the house soon becomes unbearable, and as impossible sightings of people and animals long dead keep arising, Tsidi starts to comprehend what kind of damaging impact living in service has had on Mavis — and the emotional weight of historically exploited labour has had on families for generations.
What kind of film is Good Madam? Is it a horror, one of the elevated variety, where the scares serve a complex metaphor about political or emotional trauma? It certainly has profound, potent observations within its narrative, but while the scares are reliably effective, they’re in too small a number and aren’t integrated into the turning points of the story to feel like a conventional horror. Is it a psychological thriller? It’s clearly psychological, with a relentlessly aggressive push into the strained, unravelling minds of its troubled characters, but it’s so much more interested by this aspect to give us any real thrills.
The answer is, of course, it doesn’t matter, because Good Madam is a solid enough drama to not need categorisation, but its reluctance to slot too easily into any recognisable narrative design is part of what makes it compelling. The film will disappoint fans of horror for a lack of truly frightening moments, but those looking for a complex, if tense, character piece will be put off by its infrequent leanings into genre machinations. Good Madam seems unaffected by this likelihood, comfortable finding its own personal stylistic balance for a unique story of servitude, historical racism, and punitive family structures.
But a familiarity with both these types of narratives may also thwart an audience’s ability to stay invested. Good Madam is all at once a very quiet and very loud film. Quiet because of its pacing; it’s a slow march towards nightmarish territory, one that doesn’t stop to explain the Black South African family dynamics that Tsidi escapes from and the off-kilter ones she arrives into. Its complexities can feel inaccessible in moments, something not aided by some bizarre structural editing, but it’s all in service of submerging you in the unique, conflict-ridden reality Tsidi lives in.
Good Madam’s loudness is there in its atmosphere, which feels deadening at points, often because of the sound work. The minute sounds of housework, wooden stools and heavy brushes scraping along the floor, are levelled up to intolerable volumes. In the score, there’s lots of extended notes and chanting, which feels both like a prophetic warning and a cry of forgotten pain when directed at our characters.
But the film is also loud because the subtext, while present, isn’t elusive. Once familiar with the foundations on which the story is built, and knowing what kind of horror the film borrows from, you can see everything more or less playing out in front of you. It’s still interesting — its commentaries on white entitlement to and ownership of Black labour are particularly unsettling — but there’s little subversive about the ways it reaches its conclusion. “This house doesn’t like mama,” Winnie is told at one point, in case we hadn’t gathered from everything the film is saying metaphorically.
Despite struggling in its execution, coming away from Good Madam there’s a sense of an undeniable richness. Tsidi leaves an environment of fractured relationships and arrives in one seemingly whole, but the house’s old photos of smiling Black labourers and tribal African garb barely conceals a parasitic proliferation of colonialist ideologies, one that can infect the perspective of those it subjugates. At one point, Mavis tells Tsidi the owners of the house buried their staff in the garden, keeping them all together even in the afterlife. “I don’t think that’s legal,” Tsidi says. “It is legal,” Mavis retorts. “This is their land.” But the land has become haunted with abuse and injustice, and it will stay that way until power has shifted above the ground.
