Girl for Services

Behind tall gates stand five luxurious houses where well-off, respectable families live with their children and hired foreign household assistants. Yesterday’s schoolgirl Emmilу comes here from provincial Brittany to work as a nanny and housekeeper: to look after the children, keep things clean, improve her English, prepare for admission to the journalism faculty, and finally see “real life.” At first, it seems to her that fate has granted her a dream.

However, in this prosperity, anxiety becomes more and more apparent: endless exhaustion, nightmares, strange rustling and whispers, muted night prayers, an illness of the older child that they persistently refuse to talk about… Emmilу is not left without supervision, cut off from the outside world, forbidden to go beyond the gates — and she sinks, step by step, into a sticky, relentless paranoia. What is really happening in these houses? What do their perfect masters want? And is it possible to get out of here?

Sidonie Bonnec — a French journalist, radio and television host — announces herself with a hypnotic psychological thriller about how the desire for a better life can turn into a trap, and that “powerless” does not mean “defenseless.” The most terrifying part: the plot is based on real events.

First time in Russian!