‘Maid’ Review: Margaret Qualley Shines in This Heartbreaking Portrait of Poverty

The word “gritty” is thrown around too much these days. It’s used to describe superhero films shot in shadows, crime dramas with a lot of blood, and even teen dramas overstuffed with sex. Netflix‘s new limited series Maid, however, feels legitimately gritty. It’s full of supercuts of Margaret Qualley‘s titular character Alex scouring the grime out of bathtubs, windexing the smudges off windows, and even puking at the sight of nightmares found in the houses she cleans. The grit is physically there under her fingernails and figuratively filling up every frame.

Far from an escapist binge, Maid is an unblinking look at the way society traps people in poverty. It’s a searing examination of the way generational trauma keeps resurrecting itself in peoples’s lives like a hydra, forcing children to relive their own parents’ mistakes. Most of all, though, Maid is a difficult, but necessary look at poverty in America.

Netflix’s Maid is based on the best-selling Stephanie Land memoir of the same name. Like Margaret Qualley’s Alex, Land was an aspiring writer who became a maid to support herself and young child Story. It was a grueling life that gave her an up close and personal look at the grotesque reality of poverty in modern America as well as the bitter emptiness of her rich patrons’ seemingly picture perfect lives. Land worked her way out of domestic service through the power of her brilliant writing. Most, though, aren’t so lucky. And Netflix’s Maid attacks this horror with brutal candor.

Although Maid is about the everyday plight of a single mother cleaning houses for a living, the show is far more focused on the insidious nature of generational trauma. After her emotionally abusive boyfriend Sean (Nick Robinson) punches a hole in the wall, Alex decides to leave their trailer with their angelic two-year-old daughter Maddie (Rylea Nevaeh Whittet) in tow. The problem is she has no place to go. Alex’s mother Paula (played by Qualley’s real life mom Andie MacDowell) is flighty and selfish. Her friends are all loyal to Sean. Alex has no savings, no resume, and a lost chance at college she feels she squandered. The first and only job she can get is working as a maid. The question Alex asks herself out loud at one point is how did she get here? According to Maid, the answer is a cruel co-mingling of generational trauma and a broken societal system.

Alex’s ex Sean isn’t the one dimensional villain you might find in stories of domestic abuse. He really loves her and Maddie, and is struggling with trauma of his own. He was abused by an addict as a child and is now fighting his own battle with alcoholism. Likewise, Alex has a revelation mid-season that the reason she’s not close with her father is because he, as a young angry alcoholic, abused her mother. As much as Sean and Alex say they want to do better by Maddie, they keep falling into the patterns they’ve been taught. Hurting matters? Whenever they stumble, there’s no easy way to get back up.

Maid does a tremendous job showing the way debt, shame, and red tape dog the poor in America. Alex is followed around at times by an ever-dwindling tally of her finances. While filling out much-needed assistance forms, the words transform into slurs about people who take welfare. What seems logically and reasonable — that Alex should be allowed to remove her child from a dangerous situation — is challenged by sadistic laws and bureaucratic nonsense.

If Maid sounds like a grim slog, it is; but it also isn’t. The show is lifted by the omnipresent promise of hope. (After all, the author of the memoir that inspired the show eventually did work her way out of poverty and is now a best-selling author.) However the show is constantly lifted out of despair by the power of Alex’s love for her daughter. Their bond feels not only real, but transcendent.

Furthermore, Maid features a magnificent performance from its leading lady, Margaret Qualley. The dancer-turned-actress might be best known for playing Charles Manson’s most beguiling hippie follower in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood…, but in Maid, Qualley officially catapults herself into the same league as Anya Taylor-Joy and Florence Pugh. She’s captivating, intelligent, quirky, comic, and perhaps the one person who could have sold all ten hours of Alex’s tumultuous journey.

Maid is not a cozy weekend binge nor is it a crackling murder mystery. That said, it does deserve to be your next Netflix watch. The series tells a haunting, but ultimately inspiring, human story and features a next level performance from Margaret Qualley. It might also change the way you think about poverty. No one deserves to be trapped in the situations Alex finds herself in and yet so many people all over the world are.

Watch Maid on Netflix