The Servant (1963)
Directed by Joseph Losey
An indolent aristocrat gets more than he bargained for when he hires a competent but silently devious manservant.
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What critics compared The Servant to
At times the plot teasingly recalls Joseph Losey's The Servant and Pier Paolo Pasoloni’s Theorem , poison-tipped parables about cunning social outcasts staging stealth home invasions against upper-class hosts.
Taking cues from classics of domestic intrigue such as Kim Ki-young’s “The Housemaid” (1960) and Joseph Losey’s “The Servant” (1963), they send this domestic drama vaulting into satire, suspense, terror and full-blown tragedy.
But the role of spiritual other half by rights belongs to the starship’s valet: a serenely servile android named David, played by Michael Fassbender in a performance reminiscent of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” Dirk Bogarde’s “The Servant” and Peter O’Toole’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” which David studies assiduously to learn how to be human.
Reflections are a visual motif in the film, and at one point we see Tom and Patrick in bed together through the convex mirror in Patrick’s apartment, a nod to the queer-coded classic The Servant .
(In perhaps a deeply buried in-joke, Simon's big boss is even played by James Fox, star of the starting point of all these personality-crisis films, Joseph Losey's '63 classic, "The Servant.")
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In a delicious game of domestic subterfuge that plays like a remake of Joseph Losey's "The Servant," Peyton undermines Claire's existence while seducing her with a smooth impersonation of the ideal mother's helper.
Richard Gere reveals his favourite scary film to be "The Servant" and discusses how it inspired his work on "The Mothman Prophecies".
I have not seen such energetic and creative mirror work done on screen since Joseph Losey’s 1963 slow burn psychodrama The Servant, or Gary Sherman’s technically adroit Poltergeist III.
The late Joseph Losey might have shaped this material as successfully as he did other Pinter scripts like The Go-Between, Accident, and best of all, The Servant.