Peter Lawler is fascinated by the film:
The one pleasure of these white women, it seems, is tyrannizing over the woman who actually does work and love in their homes. They are utterly repulsed by physical contact with blacks, and their concern with hygiene (reflected in an intensifying effort to make sure the races use separate bathrooms) is really a desire to have no emotional connection with those over whom they rule without limits. Still, they turn their children over to "the help," and let their hired women lavish loving affection on the their kids as if they were their own. What's especially striking is the utter lack of gratitude of the white women for what they have, for all the help they have received.
Alyssa Rosenberg, on the other hand, was disappointed, viewing the villians as "so cartoonish that viewers won’t risk recognizing themselves or echoes of their behavior in them." But she's excited about another project:
I’m less interested in the badness of this particular piece of art, and more interested in why we keep making Noble White Ladies Meet the Civil Rights Movement movies, and how we can get something different in production. Turns out, all it takes is Brad Pitt, who is adapting Twelve Years a Slave, the memoirs of Solomon Northup, a free black man who in 1841 was kidnapped, held in slave pens in Washington, DC, and sold into bondage in Louisiana.
The Dish 