THE STORY – Millie, a young woman with a troubled past, becomes the live-in housemaid for the wealthy Winchester family. Their seemingly perfect life unravels when she discovers their household hides dark secrets.
THE CAST – Sydney Sweeney, Amanda Seyfried, Brandon Sklenar, Michele Morrone, Elizabeth Perkins & Indiana Elle
THE TEAM – Paul Feig (Director) & Rebecca Sonnenshine (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 131 Minutes
When Millie (Sydney Sweeney) first shows up at the Winchester residence to interview for the position of live-in housemaid, she feels out of place. With her slightly ratty dark clothes, mousy glasses, and flyaways, she’s almost the exact opposite of the immaculately groomed, overly friendly Nina (Amanda Seyfried), who’s dressed in shades of white and beige to match her home’s pristine interior design. Millie assumes Nina saw right through her and her made-up resume and that she’ll never hear from her again, but just when it looks like she’ll have to work in another dead-end diner to satisfy her parole officer, Nina calls to give her the job. When Millie returns to the Winchesters’ home, she finds it in complete disarray, and Nina’s husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) and daughter Cecelia (Indiana Elle) seem shocked to see her. The next morning, Millie awakens to find Nina turning the kitchen upside down, looking for papers she accuses Millie of throwing out. While picking Cecelia up from ballet class and serving tea at PTA board meetings, Millie hears frightening gossip about Nina’s past behavior, including a stay in a mental institution. Despite all this, Millie stays on, desperate as she is for a job and a place to live (never mind that the door to her room in the house’s attic only locks from the outside). As Nina becomes more demanding and manipulative, Andrew comes to Millie’s defense more and more, and before long, Andrew and Millie find themselves on a special night out meant for him to share with Nina. But who’s playing who here? Millie, who could find herself back in prison if she doesn’t have a job? Andrew, who seems to be at the end of his rope with his wife’s drastic mood swings? Or Nina, who seems to be setting Millie up for failure at every turn?
Paul Feig’s “The Housemaid,“ based on the novel of the same name by Freida McFadden, finds the director returning to the pulpy potboiler realm of his 2018 hit “A Simple Favor,“ although it’s clear that where he really shines is in corralling ensembles of comedians to largely improvised heights in films like “Bridesmaids“ and “Spy.“ While Feig bears some responsibility for the caustic wit that made “A Simple Favor“ work so well, “The Housemaid“ takes itself far more seriously, mixing plot and character elements from woman-in-peril domestic thrillers like “Gaslight“ and “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle“ with elements of erotic thrillers. It’s not exactly funny, but at least Seyfried goes gonzo enough during Nina’s freakouts that it has at least an element of camp creeping in around the edges. Without the humor, though, Feig reveals himself as a director with a considerable lack of flair, falling back on generic thriller tropes such as dissonant soundtrack cues and cheap jump scares.
Until the last act, “The Housemaid“ bores just as much as it entertains, setting up later reveals with overbearingly obvious signposting and annoyingly coy “throwaway“ lines of dialogue (“Andrew says I’m gonna kill myself on these stairs,“ Nina laughs while showing Millie their spiral staircase when she first arrives). Sure, the setup is necessary to move all the pieces into place for the climax’s big reveals, but it’s no fun to sit through. A lot of that can be laid at the feet of the pacing; the film mostly just sits there, inelegantly lumbering from scene to scene like a drunkard about to pass out. The cast doesn’t really help, either, as Sweeney looks completely adrift (and sounds even worse in the turgid voiceover narration), Sklenar is a pretty but personality-free void, and Seyfried plays everything at a 10, seemingly to compensate for her costars’ complete lack of energy.
When the film starts throwing twists and turns at the audience in its last act, it finally feels like proper fun, but not the kind Feig seems to have been going for. The last act of “The Housemaid“ is a hootin’-and-hollerin’ good time at the movies, assuming you have a crowd that’s willing to talk back to the screen. Nearly every single overdone bad-movie trope makes an appearance: Characters do things no sane person would ever do, handwave away their knowledge of things they couldn’t have known, and generally misbehave in ways that are very fun to watch but that make no sense. McFadden’s plot goes so far over the top that the only way to approach it is as camp, but since the preceding ninety-plus minutes have been such a slog, it just comes across as desperate, sloppy, and easy to make fun of. There’s plenty of laughter, to be sure, but it’s from people laughing at the film much more than with it, in large part because the film is far too pleased with its own pulpiness to ever laugh at itself. While Seyfried leans into the camp factor whenever she can, Sweeney doesn’t, playing Millie with a grit that feels grounded in reality, only embracing the pulpiness of the part when the last act forces her to do so. This blend of knowing, intentional camp and genuine Sontag-like camp (achieved by people treating their junky, middlebrow material with the seriousness of high art) rarely works, and here it makes for an awkward, even cringy watch.
Had Feig leaned into the material more, “The Housemaid“ could have been a genuinely entertaining, campy good time. Treat the sex scenes as dangerous instead of romantic, add some hints of lesbian attraction between Millie and Nina, and have the camera leer at Sweeney’s busty figure more, and it could be a killer erotic thriller. Play up the themes of upper-class rigidity and lower-class desperation, and it could be a sharp satire. Instead, Feig approaches the material as straightforwardly as possible, putting the blandest possible version of a pulp paperback beach read onscreen. He doesn’t have anything to say about the material, nor does he have anything to add to it. While this might please fans of the novel, the rest of the audience will likely end up wondering what all the fuss was about. The so-bad-it’s-good last act may be fun enough to convince you that “The Housemaid“ is a good time on the whole, and yeah, it kind of is. But that doesn’t make it good.
