The Diary of a Chambermaid

Part of my coverage of the 62nd Chicago International Film Festival

THE DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID   **1/2

Radu Jude

2026

IDEA:  A Romanian woman works as a live-in nanny for a family in Bordeaux, France while rehearsing for a theatrical production of Octave Mirbeau's The Diary of a Chambermaid.

BLURB:  The Diary of a Chambermaid is the third, or maybe fourth, consecutive film by Radu Jude to caustically reimagine an older European text. In his contemporary updates of these works, whether as canonical as Europe ’51 or Dracula or as obscure as Angela Goes On, Jude diagnoses a 21st-century state of the world afflicted by all their same animating sociopolitical issues, only now in different forms. An immigrant domestic servant still has to put up with the exhausting crap of her employers, but now she has the added daily labor of making video calls to a dyspeptic young daughter she can see but never be beside. Champagne socialists still proclaim their virtue around the dinner table, but now they can pull up snuff war footage posted to their Facebook group to prove their social conscience. Mobile screens and their images take up a significant portion of The Diary of a Chambermaid’s aesthetic, as they do our everyday visual economies, and Jude shows how they do less to foster connection than compound our distance from people and things we aren’t meaningfully engaging with. Perhaps this is why face-to-face storytelling — from a stage production of Chambermaid to Gianina’s Romanian folktales — assumes such an integral role in the film, making history and narrative materially present in spaces from which they’ve been emptied, or paved over by the façade of neoliberal progress. (Which isn’t to say those retold histories or narratives are without their own oversights!) The thing is, Jude has basically said all this already, with greater verve, wit, and formal ingenuity, in previous films, especially when he used a more essayistic, confrontational style to rupture the language of the status quo. As cynical as he is, it may be a sign of his underlying humanism that he’s reduced some of that bile, content to toss off a wink rather than a grenade.

Digger

DIGGER   ***

Alejandro G. Iñárritu

2026

**SPOILERS AHEAD**

IDEA:  In a dystopian future ravaged by ecological catastrophe, a crew puts on a stage production of a cult-classic play depicting the Texas oil tycoon responsible for the crisis.

BLURB:  A nagging creative problem over the last decade, especially in the US, has been how to satirize a reality more insane and unbelievable than any satire. Iñárritu and his collaborators have answered with a clever Brechtian solution: you make a movie where reality is staged as literal theater. Although heavily hinted at through ersatz digital backdrops and a curtain rising under a proscenium, Digger doesn’t give away its game until about 30 minutes in, at which point it becomes exponentially more complex and interesting than the shrill screed against the power elite it initially seemed to be. This isn’t a novel metatextual device (it was present without the misdirect in Birdman), but Iñárritu is after something more insightful than just another tricksy blurring of reality and representation. He wants to understand the value and capacity of art — culturally, economically, psychologically — in reflecting the horrors of the real world. For most of the film, this is done from the side of the creators, particularly Tom Cruise’s Curtis Markson as notorious, apocalypse-hastening oil tycoon Digger Rockwell. Markson’s conflict with his director over how to portray Digger and his time underscores the film’s skepticism about the credibility of historical representation. Just how faithful is Fossil Fools, the play-within-the-film, to the events it depicts? Is it supposed to be funnier to the film’s diegetic future audience than it seems to us, or is it so appealing simply because it provides the catharsis of watching (reliving?) the comeuppance of awful and likely long-dead people? Iñárritu channels these uncertainties through prickly tensions between textures and tones. They percolate in Dennis Gassner’s production design, an uncanny mélange of implausible multimedia stagecraft; Emmanuel Lubezki’s claustrophobic low-angle close-ups, perversely at odds with any theater-seat vantage; Cosmo Sheldrake’s bizarre musique-concrète score; and the OTT performances, however unevenly the cast is utilized. In its final switcheroo, Digger shifts its perspective to the audience, making us question the meaning of our own media consumption. Can art effect real change? Society has been wondering that forever, and Iñárritu is obviously wary. What he does know is it gets us thinking about this question at all, and that we’ll continue pondering it through all the Diggers and Fossil Fools yet to come.

La Gradiva

LA GRADIVA   ***

Marine Atlan

2026

IDEA:  On a class trip to Pompeii just before graduation, conflicts big and small arise among a diverse group of French high-school students and their teacher.

BLURB:  Anyone who’s been on a school trip abroad or studied far from home knows that a substantial portion of the learning happens well outside the official lesson plan. Usually, the coursework ends up dovetailing with the random stuff going on in your life, and if you’re not too distracted by the latter, the two have the tendency to mutually enrich each other. The students in La Gradiva aren’t yet conscious of the connections. While they learn about plate tectonics and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, tensions among them are building to a head. In scenes of remarkably fluid, documentary-like realism — the most brilliant taking place in front of a Dionysian fresco — the class is increasingly unable to hold together as simmering resentments become scathing attacks, and Madame Mercier (a superb Antonia Buresi) finally cracks. Throughout all this, Toni is conducting a private, parallel excavation into his own family history, surfacing uncomfortable truths about class relations that reverberate in his close friendship with the affluent James. Atlan’s script has a novelistic complexity in the way it shifts between the perspectives of several characters who keep on revealing multitudes. The tragedy is their inability to recognize those shades in each other, clinging as they are, sometimes literally, to static images and their false narratives. La Gradiva’s emotional wallop comes not only from its climactic event, but the impossibility of fully accounting for it. Like our view of Vesuvius’s victims, frozen at the last moment of their lives, we can only try to interpret the traces left by the past. The trip ends, the class goes home, but the learning never stops.

Chronovisor

CHRONOVISOR   **1/2

Jack Auen and Kevin Walker

2026

IDEA:  A professor at Columbia University becomes obsessed with learning about the chronovisor, a machine allegedly invented by Benedictine monk Pellegrino Ernetti that allows the user to observe any moment from the past.

BLURB:  A mystery-thriller whose most recurrent visual is a slow pan over a book page, Chronovisor turns the activity of scholarly research into a subject of cinematic excitement. The narrative, as it were, is driven by nothing so much as the protagonist’s thirst for specialty knowledge. Chronovisor unfolds largely in grand, tenebrous libraries by glowing banker’s lamps, dramatizing what is basically intangible — intellectual pursuit — by focusing on its material effects. In harmony with its retro 16 mm aesthetic, the film incorporates books, journals, magazines, CRT screens, audio recordings, and other analog information technologies into a fascinating intermedia gestalt. It’s especially keenly attuned to the affects of concentrated study, using glacial long takes, a hypnotic orchestral score, and sequences composed entirely of print to reproduce the attention-sharpening, temporal-suspending flow of being drawn into a world of ideas. Anne Laure Sellier’s agog eyes, shown in closeup examining an artifact, mirror our own curiosity, while her vexed process of tracking down leads captures the more routine, enervating side of academic access. Auen and Walker know these feelings well, for the research performed onscreen is the double of the research they did to make the film. The problem is their findings become less credible the more they lead down a conspiracy rabbit hole, and their metatextual bona fides all but telegraph the ouroboros of a denouement. Chronovisor buzzes with entrancingly eerie mood, but, ironically, it could use a little more academic rigor.

The Beast of Mossy Bottom

THE BEAST OF MOSSY BOTTOM   ***

Steve Cox and Matthew Walker

2026

IDEA:  When Shaun's invention to quickly regrow his pumpkin patch inadvertently creates a beast in Mossy Bottom, he must use his wits to set things right.

BLURB:  Shaun and his flock are up to more escapades in The Beast of Mossy Bottom, another smart, warm, zippy installment in Aardman’s most cheerfully laconic franchise. Where the previous Farmaggedon used the template of a friendly alien-visitation story, The Beast of Mossy Bottom takes a page from the Wallace & Gromit features to riff on the monster movie. The characters are introduced as if rising from the dead — the sheep even perform some quick “Thriller” moves — and before long, a mad-scientist Shaun is in a shadowy castle lab devising the first of many hilariously convoluted solutions to a very mundane problem. As ever, the gags come at a steady clip, and their cleverness often lies in their elegant simplicity. While there are expected references to horror classics (including a Psycho shower scene with a surprising sound source), the film doesn’t depend on them. The best jokes are unrelated to the genre, such as a frightened hamster trying to run away by spinning in the other direction on its wheel, or a weather vane that’s transformed into a roasted chicken after it’s struck by lightning. The timelessness of the visual comedy is spiked with some sharp jabs at contemporary culture, most evident in a townsperson who never looks up from his phone and another who sees the beast as yet another opportunity for a live-streamed performance. The Beast of Mossy Bottom has real things to say about ignorance and mob mentality, about the monsters we only imagine, and it does so with the hand-crafted Aardman invention that itself looks like a kind of mad science.

La Bola Negra

LA BOLA NEGRA   ***

Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi

2026

IDEA:  Across multiple timelines spanning from the years just before the Spanish Civil War to contemporary Spain, the lives of a handful of gay men connect in fortuitous ways.

BLURB:  La Bola Negra names both an unfinished novel from the 1930s and a film from the 2020s that attempts to, if not finish the novel, continue its legacy and redeem it from the erasures of history. In doing so, the film symbolically enacts the very story it tells: the rescue of a lost work through the transhistorical fraternity, tenacity, and collaboration of queer creators across nearly a century. There is a hereditary inheritance here, but La Bola Negra’s braided timelines and character journeys reveal a less linear kind of inheritance, in which experience, memory, and knowledge are transferred between a constellation of gay men, both fictional and real. From Guitarricadelafuente’s gangly, perpetually sad-eyed trumpeter Sebastián, alienated amid the machismo of his Nationalist army brothers (however flagrantly homoerotic their rituals are), to the legendary Federico García Lorca, these men spiritually transcend their fractured times and places. Los Javis and co-screenwriter Alberto Conejero are the other, implicit figures in this intergenerational group of artists, and they take great care to make La Bola Negra an earnest tribute to voices stifled and lives destroyed by unjust regimes. That earnestness sometimes results in stilted, on-the-nose exposition, like when Lorca urges his lover to get his manuscript out into the world so gay people in the future can learn from it. The film is more convincing, and engaging, when it trusts its visuals and music to speak loudest, whether it’s as simple as an overhead shot of a truck crammed with maimed bodies, as ecstatic as a barroom dance captured in a single, pirouetting take, or as operatic (and lightly surreal, à la Lorca) as Carlos climbing out of a bombed-out casino onto majestic snowy slopes. There’s enough of these sequences to make La Bola Negra richer than the didactic project it sometimes feels like, and enough heart to land its idea that if trauma can be passed down through generations, so too can the tools for endurance.