The Housemaid

The combination of Paul Feig’s darkly comic direction, Freida McFadden’s source novel, and Sydney Sweeney’s and Amanda Seyfried’s performances make this psychological thriller an unexpected delight.

Premise: Down-on-her-luck Millie Calloway (Sydney Sweeney) thinks her prayers have been answered when a rich couple, Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried) and her husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar), offer her a job as their live-in housekeeper.  But Millie soon starts to struggle with Nina’s erratic behaviour, unpredictable mood swings and paranoid suspicions.

Review:

Judged against what it set out to do, The Housemaid is an unqualified success.  It’s not trying to be as comedic as something like director Paul Feig’s other crime thriller series (the hugely enjoyable A Simple Favour films), although The Housemaid does have its own dark sense of humour that runs throughout.  But it’s also not trying to be a straight-up, gritty thriller in the vein of something like the recent Blink Twice either.  Instead, it aims to land somewhere between the two – it is tongue-in-cheek in places and it knows how over-the-top its story is, but it’s also a genuinely tense and gripping thriller that goes in some unexpected directions.

Ultimately, The Housemaid feels to me like a throwback in tone to the pulpy, potboiler psychological thrillers of the 80s and 90s, films like Fatal Attraction, Single White Female and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.  Those films weren’t particularly “grounded” or “realistic” either, but they were all the better for leaning into their heightened realities and arch characters – and for me, The Housemaid is very much the next generation of that dynasty.  I had a great time with this movie, as did the rest of the audience I saw it with, who gasped, laughed and cheered in all the right places (because this is very much a film where you need those cathartic releases to periodically ease the tension).

“…the three leads are all fantastic…”

I don’t want to say too much about the plot, because the film itself is very careful to limit the amount of information that viewers have to begin with – even Millie Calloway’s (Sydney Sweeney) full backstory is held back, so that audiences initially only know that she’s desperate for a job, but not why she’s so desperate.  I don’t think audiences would necessarily question why Millie accepts the job as a live-in housemaid to Nina (Amanda Seyfried) and Andrew Winchester (Brandon Sklenar) in the first place, but the film certainly adequately explains why Millie feels that she can’t simply resign and walk away from the job once things start getting uncomfortable for her.

The film focuses, almost exclusively, on these three central characters – although Indiana Elle also appears as Nina and Andrew’s daughter (and she underplays her role nicely), and Elizabeth Perkins has a very fun cameo as Nina’s overbearing mother-in-law, both those supporting roles still only get a fairly small amount of screentime.  Thankfully, the three leads are all fantastic – Sydney Sweeney brings layers to her performance as the housemaid with a hidden past, while Amanda Seyfried seems to be having a lot of fun sinking her teeth into such a larger-than-life character.  Meanwhile, Brandon Sklenar (who I hadn’t seen in anything before this) strikes a tricky balance between trying to placate his wife while also trying to comfort Millie when she’s obviously upset by Nina’s behaviour – which in turn only seems to fuel Nina’s paranoia that Millie’s trying to steal her husband.

“…the cinematic equivalent of a page turner that you can’t put down…”

Like Paul Feig’s first A Simple Favour film, The Housemaid is an ingenious melding of his darkly comic sensibilities, an inventive source novel, and some inspired casting – and the end result was far more enjoyable that I was expecting.  If you can embrace the heightened tone and enjoy the film for what it is, this is the cinematic equivalent of a page turner that you can’t put down.