The enduring fascination with Jack the Ripper mirrors the grip that the Papin sisters’ crime has on France—two maids who committed a brutal murder of their employer and her child in Le Mans during 1933. Jean Genet drew from this shocking event to create his well-known one-act play, "The Maids," while prominent French thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jacques Lacan have attempted to understand the strange nature of their actions. Jean-Pierre Denis’s intense film is the newest exploration of this story, standing among the most disturbing true crime dramas since IN COLD BLOOD, and it's remarkably complete. Drawing on trial transcripts, personal recollections, and Paulette Houdyer's book, L'Affaire Papin, the movie explores all the elements that continue to make this case so compelling: repressed desires, mental illness, class conflict, family problems, gender inequality, and a devastating instance of shared psychosis culminating in 30 minutes of extreme brutality. Sylvie Testud delivers an unsettling portrayal as Christine Papin, one of four daughters raised in poverty by a troubled mother and a father with alcohol issues and sexual abuse tendencies. After being separated during their childhoods, Christine is reunited with her younger sister, Lea (Julie-Marie Parmentier), and manages to get both hired as maids for several middle-class families. As Christine succumbs to delusional paranoia, she begins to fall apart. She believes that her mother intends to take Lea away, her unhealthy attachment to Lea grows into something physical, and the anger she feels toward their current employer, Madame Lancelin (Dominique Labourier), intensifies. Christine becomes a powder keg ready to explode in an act of horrifying violence. Testud’s restrained performance makes Christine's mental breakdown as frightening as the crime itself, and Denis refrains from softening the impact on viewers; there is no musical score to ease tension. Even so many years later, the details remain elusive, but Denis’s film offers a disturbing and thorough account.

Source on TMDB