South African writer and film-maker Jenna Cato Bass has created an eerie, unsettling movie with something of Jordan Peele’s Get Out: its whispers and susurrations are the sound effects of a bad dream and it straddles the genres of supernatural thriller, satire and political parable.
Chumisa Cosa plays Tsidi, a young black woman in Cape Town who is estranged from Luthando (Khanyiso Kenqa), the father of her little girl Winnie (Kamvelethu Jonas Raziya). Some fierce arguments in Tsidi’s extended family mean that Tsidi and Winnie are effectively homeless and have to move in with Tsidi’s elderly mother Mavis (Nosipho Mtebe), the devoted maid and live-in nurse to a wealthy old white woman called Diane, who is catatonic and bedridden.
Effectively in secret, and without family permission, Tsidi and Winnie camp out in Mavis’s modest quarters within the handsome gated property in the city’s white district, and Diane herself is a deeply strange unseen presence up in her room almost like Norman Bates’s mother. Mavis claims to be able to hear the old woman calling her. Tsidi can hear nothing but silence, but at other times hears strange noises and sees ghostly phenomena, including the appearance of Diane’s long-dead dog.
Tsidi is extremely disturbed by her mother’s slavish devotion to this comatose symbol of white rule, which she calls an “apartheid” relationship. But Mavis points out that Diane is the person who is putting a roof over her head, and now Tsidi and Winnie’s heads: her sons live in Australia and don’t want to be bothered with any problems. Diane is like a living fetish in this creepy and menacing old house, a sacrificial goddess who underwrites a way of life that Mavis is entirely happy with. The problem arises with Mavis’s other son Stuart (Sanda Shandu) who became a favourite with Diane while growing up and now has ideas of his own about how she should be treated.
Good Madam is an intriguing, atmospheric movie which doesn’t quite tie up all its sinister portents and implications in a satisfying ending. Yet there is something very unsettling in it.
• Good Madam is available on 14 July on Shudder.
