The plot of the new psychological thriller, The Housemaid, is simple enough: a young woman with a troubled past becomes a wealthy family’s live-in maid. All is well… until it isn’t. Based on the 2022 New York Times Best Seller by Freida McFadden, The Housemaid has all of the makings of a surefire page-to-screen adaptation… until it doesn’t.
That’s not to say the entirety of the film’s far-too-long runtime (the movie clocks in at two hours and 11 minutes, when in a perfect world it would be a tight 95 minutes) is unsuccessful. In fact, there are sequences where The Housemaid, led by Amanda Seyfried, Sydney Sweeney, and Brandon Sklenar, is a massively entertaining trifecta of backstabbing, surprise moments, and beautiful, luxurious indoor spaces. The issue is that those moments happen too far and few between to sustain the film for anything more than a less-than-stellar time at the movies.
Nina (Seyfried), a wealthy housewife married to Andrew (Sklenar), hires the unassuming Millie (Sweeney) to be her adamant assistant around the house. Millie is currently living in her car, attempting to pull herself from the rut of her mysterious and unsettled past, so Nina’s job offer can’t come at a better time. Plus, Millie gets her own upstairs bedroom (which, Nina tells her, is soundproofed—clearly so she can play her music as loud as she wants, of course). What’s not to love? Well, as it turns out, lots!
Nina quickly swerves on Millie, abandoning her warm and welcoming nature and instead irrationally lashing out at her with obscene reactions to menial tasks, revealing something a bit more sinister beneath the fashionable facade. Andrew steps in to defend Millie, citing that Nina has had a complex past of emotional wherewithal. A few snappy instances transpire, further igniting the soon-to-be massive fire between Nina and Millie. But it’s what happens when Nina is away visiting her daughter, Cecilia (Indiana Elle), at camp that officially sets the fire ablaze.
The Housemaid is built on its ability to remain spoiler-free, so I won’t get into any further narrative details, but just know that things get real dicey as the movie progresses. Brace yourself! And to the film’s credit, the final 20 minutes are pretty wild. But the end doesn’t quite justify the means it takes to get there, softening the crazy conclusion.
Paul Feig, who most recently directed Another Simple Favor earlier this year and is probably best known for 2011’s Bridesmaids, does a serviceable job of shooting the movie, albeit his job is made easier when the three leads ooze sexiness at every moment; the tension of the character triangle rests on this erotic-tinged line between love and hate. Even with that naturally at play from each actor, they clearly seem to all be acting in different movies. Seyfried easily delivers the best performance (as she tends to do in every movie she is in), working her hardest to unlock the psychological madness of the movie, while Sklenar and Sweeney provide little more than the bare minimum needed to keep the movie moving.
It doesn’t help that the script is staggeringly lifeless. It gives away its hand idiotically early and keeps potentially interesting characters, well, extremely uninteresting. The thing that ultimately makes The Housemaid successful, or any adult thriller for that matter, is the thrill. You hop in the car with the characters and the setup, and you don’t know when they’ll turn left, right, or rampage straight down the road at 100 mph. A stale, simplistic script doesn’t offer that opportunity. There are also a few editing and narrative decisions that act like the wrong puzzle piece to the larger jigsaw we are trying to solve.
Whether or not the movie will be popular is a completely different conversation. After my early screening, people were applauding. They were fully immersed in the consistent, if not overused, plot twists. They bought into the brief emotional blazes between particular characters. They seemingly loved it, even if I didn’t. I have a hunch this movie will make some good money at the box office. It releases nationwide on December 19th and is savvy counterprogramming from Lionsgate during a pretty jam-packed late-December slate: Avatar: Fire & Ash is over three hours, Is This Thing On? is an Oscar-level drama, and The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants is, well, SpongeBob.
The Housemaid continues the trend of BookTok-to-screen and does provide some level of entertainment, however slight and bewildering it may be. Fancy houses, tasteful clothes, and hot people do amount to something, but they could have amounted to so much more. It’s a frustrating film, one that is so extraordinarily predictable that it sucks any mysterious tension away from what could have been an edge-of-your-seat thriller. It never comes together to be a satisfactory whole.
As the saying goes, I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.
Review Courtesy of Ethan Simmie
Feature Image Credit to Lionsgate via The Hollywood Reporter