With Joey Jumbler, he channeled the real-life experience of his actor, Alain Boucher, to craft something that feels deeply personal while also commenting on the social politics of Quebec. Using a wealthy family to contrast Joey’s profession, nationality, and social status, Chamandy created a powerful juxtaposition that was brought to a softly emotional climax in its final moments. Similar to Joey Jumbler, Chamandy builds social class into The Maids Will Come on Monday’s DNA, but his exploration here is more focused on the hollowness its well-to-do characters feel. Where Jumbler examines the line that separates the rich from the poor, Maids takes sharp aim at the walls people of the same background build around each other, which inflict a deep sense of unbearable loneliness.

What starts as a pretty standard Christmas dinner slowly begins to unravel into familial disarray. We meet Julianne (Amanda Rydvald) and her family — minus her son, who’s absence is tied to a prior engagement with a friend (something that means more to him than family time) — as they arrive at her sister’s huge house, who she hasn’t seen in a long time. From its earliest moments, the lines that define characters and give them shape are present; even before they sit down for their sad (but elegant) take-out Christmas dinner (where their arrogance and disdain flow like never ending bottles of champagne), we are given a good sense of who everyone is and how they relate to one another. The well-defined characters make the family drama easier to follow and helps to better latch us to Julianne, whose inevitable breakdown gives way to a memorable and fiery conclusion.