Audiences who know her best as the ephemeral hippie from “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” may be surprised at just how well she can conjure up senses of anxiety of ambivalence about Sean, who periodically seems to Alex on the verge of really changing his ways and of deep resourcefulness. Qualley, a compelling and sharp performer, could lead viewers anywhere. A running tally in the upper-right corner of the screen emerges at moments of highest stress about money, as when Alex spends on her uniform for maid work: That tally and the stifled frustration on Qualley’s face conjures a sense of quite how much Alex is starting from behind. But the series does generally have an admirable soberness and seriousness of purpose when it comes to gaming out how, exactly, Alex’s story might unfold, from a pitched custody battle to entering a domestic-violence shelter. “Maid” is not exactly naturalistic - the show is not shy about using sometimes overheated visual metaphor to convey a plight that we already understand is quite challenging, and some of the performances and dialogue are quite florid. ![]() Alex, daughter (Rylea Nevaeh Whittet) in tow, finds itinerant employment as a home cleaner, but the hours aren’t enough to liberate her financially, and endless challenges with childcare, the legal system, and an impossible housing market mean that Robinson’s Sean swirls in and out of her life. What the show does well, in the episodes that follow, is to depict the ways in which, for many people trapped within the lower echelons of the economy, clean breaks are impossible. That’s the way “ Maid,” a new drama on Netflix, starts, as Margaret Qualley’s Alex runs from her daughter’s brutish father (Nick Robinson). In the middle of the night, a young woman grabs her daughter and runs, using what little gas is left in her car to flee her abusive partner.
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