Who’s the crazy one in this steamy, twisty-turny potboiler? Hint: It may not be who you think.
The Housemaid
Starring Sydney Sweeney, Amanda Seyfried & Brandon Sklenar
Directed by Paul Feig
Rated R
In theaters Friday, Dec. 19
When a young woman with a checkered past takes a job as a live-in maid, it pries opens a Pandora’s box of secrets in this steamy little potboiler.
Sydney Sweeney stars as Millie, who’s clearly down on her luck—living in her car, bathing in washrooms—when she she’s hired by Nina (Amanda Seyfried) to clean, cook and look after her pouty young daughter (Indiana Elle). And there’s Nina’s hunky, buff husband, Andrew (Brandon Sklenar), and a mysterious, broody groundskeeper (Michelle Morrone).
Veteran actress Elizabeth Perkins has a supporting role as Andrew’s icy, high-society mom, giving off some strong Cruella de Ville vibes.
Millie thinks she’s hit the jackpot, a job working for a perfect couple. But perfection, she learns, can be an illusion.
That everything heats up to a combustive breaking point won’t surprise anyone. But how it gets there, well, I won’t spoil it—except to say that nothing is quite as it appears to be, and first impressions can be misleading. A lot of the movie’s fine-tuned tension comes from director Paul Feig, whose resume is loaded with successful TV (Mad Men, The Office, 30 Rock) and films (Bridesmaids, The Heat, Spy). He knows how to unspool an engaging story—and spike it with stabs and jabs of humor, even when they draw blood.
And he’s working with a super-juicy, torrid tale. The film’s based on Freida McFadden’s 2022 runaway bestselling novel, which lays down the movie’s guessing-game groundwork and sets up its tangled romantic triangle built on lies, schemes, sex, misdirection and manipulation.
There are signs everywhere that trouble is brewing, revelations that add new wrinkles to the plot. Someone’s served time in prison, and you’ll find out why someone else is feigning infertility. Who’s been in and out of the psych ward? The caddish Andrew, who loves to flirt, tells Millie that his smile is a “sword.” Does he mean sword, like a weapon? When he plunks down on the sofa with her to watch a rerun of Family Feud, you know this “family” is soon going to be feuding for real.
Seyfried, soon to be seen as the founder of the Shakers in The Testament of Ann Lee, turns up the heat here in a bold performance that peels away the layers of a character who’s more complex—and more sympathetic—than she comes off. Skelener, who’ll be recognizable to Yellowstone fans as Spencer Dutton in the show’s 1923 spinoff, oozes seductive charm spiked with menace. And Sweeney, whose Hollywood star has been rising since her TV roles in The White Lotus and Euphoria, anchors it all as the domestic who finds herself with a bit more to do than dusting countertops or scrubbing toilets.
The soundtrack includes tunes from Lana Del Rey, Kelly Clarkson and Sabrina Carpenter. The opening line of Linda Ronstadt’s cover of The Rolling Stone’s “Tumbling Dice” offers a hint early about how the movie’s going to go, as she snarls about people who “always think I’m crazy…”
You too will be thinking about who’s crazy in this deliciously twisty psycho thriller that lights the fuse on a pulsating powder keg of deep, dark secrets as it barrels toward its cathartic closing explosion.
—Neil Pond
The Media Tourist 