The Housemaid Is What Happens When Female Rage Gets A House Key

Directed by Paul Feig, known for Bridesmaids and A Simple Favor, the film is in keeping with Feig’s signature campy comedic style.

Adapted from Freida McFadden’s best-selling novel, the film follows Millie Calloway (Sydney Sweeney), a young woman fresh out of prison, struggling to reintegrate into society. Looking to start over, she seeks a housemaid job for a wealthy family. Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried) interviews her in their gorgeous, sprawling home, where she lives with her husband, Andrew Winchester (Brandon Skelnar), and their aloof daughter Cece (Indiana Elle).

Seyfried gives a tour de force performance as the seemingly charming and hyper-amicable Nina, who curiously doesn’t seem to need a housekeeper despite insisting on hiring one who could pass for her younger doppelganger. The interview gives us the impression Millie has the job locked in from the start. As Nina remarks, she’s “overqualified” for the job, given her college education, and our immediate impressions of Sweeney donning a stripped-back appearance and glasses is one of a studious bookworm.

It’s only on the drive home, home being a random parking lot she pulls over to sleep in her car, where she’s been living since her release from a ten-year prison sentence, that we learn Sweeney isn’t who we thought she was. She’s hiding dark secrets. For one, she doesn’t even wear glasses, she didn’t go to college, she has no occupational experience, and her entire CV was a lie built on a house of cards.

She’s never going to get this job, she thinks to herself. The second Nina does a simple Google search, all will be revealed; it’s not like she’s short on other, more law-abiding options. At least she got $20 out of it, she thinks, a kind gesture indicating Nina valued the time and gas money she spent to be there. A benevolent boss before she’s even hired. Almost too good to be true, which is exactly what Millie is forced to contend with when Nina inexplicably calls her back and offers her the job.

As it turns out, she could use her ASAP, which works oh-so-conveniently with Millie’s parole conditions: steady employment, approved housing, regular check-ins with a parole officer, and no further offenses. This set-up leads us to wonder what on Earth this young ingénue could have done to land her a fifteen (commuted to ten) year prison sentence. The tension lingers around the film’s edges, reminding us there are things we don’t know about Millie that might prove significant.

Millie’s employment is a sweet deal. Her duties include cooking, cleaning, and helping Nina with her seven-year-old child, but before Millie officially starts, Nina is very lackadaisical about the essentialness of some of these duties, careful to say that Millie would cook some meals for them if she’s up to it. Her demeanor is chill and permissive, while the way she relates to Millie is more akin to a close cousin or good friend than a new employee. She welcomes Millie to use Andrew’s “man cave” theater stocked with snacks any time she pleases. The position is live-in, so Millie has her own small room in the attic, and all her meals are provided.

She’s enamored with the space, the cordiality, and the accommodations made for her, only to be thrown off guard when Nina’s husband and child come home, completely oblivious to the news that they’re seeking a housekeeper at all, let alone one who would be living with them. Surprise. The tension builds on the back of some foreboding oddities in Millie’s boarding: a single window that doesn’t open, a double bolt lock on the outside of the door, and chill-inducing scratch marks at the door’s edges.

The Housemaid plays fast and loose with your preconceptions of each character, knowing what audiences are thinking at any given moment.

It’s here we get our first sinister foreshadowing. Unsurprisingly, Millie remarks about these anomalies and is met with reassurance from Nina that they’ll be taken care of. She has a harmless explanation: this used to be a storage room for Andrew’s files, and her good-humored jokes about how it must look to Millie put her at ease. But there’s something intense, almost manic, lingering behind Nina’s eyes. The next morning, we’re thrown for a spin when Millie comes down to the kitchen to find Nina on a psychotic rampage, throwing things around the kitchen in a hysterical rage, turning her picture-perfect mansion into squalor.

Then come the frenzied accusations lobbed at Millie. Nina accuses her of throwing away her notes for her PTA meeting lecture she’s supposed to give that day. She’s not just suspicious, but viciously accusatory of Millie, whom she blames for carelessly throwing out her notes, of which there’s no evidence, and ruining her entire day. All the while, her husband stands there stoically, unmoved by his wife’s histrionics, and seems to know just the right words to say to calm her down, a mixture of infantilizing placation and reassurance that it’s not the end of the world. The situation can be salvaged, with enough time to touch up her roots at the salon. This remark, seemingly a sardonic quip playing on absurd priorities, proves more revealing of these characters’ psychology the further we go into the narrative.

The Housemaid plays fast and loose with your preconceptions of each character, knowing what audiences are thinking at any given moment. “Was the nice girl act Nina put on just a performance?” “Why would she want to hire a young, attractive live-in housemaid?” “What did Millie do to get such a long prison sentence?” “Is Nina crazy?” “Is Andrew really a good guy?” “What does he gain from staying in this marriage?” “How has all of this affected Cece?” “Is there sexual tension between Andrew and Millie because they’re much better suited to each other, or is this a ploy?” These questions percolate at the back of the viewer’s mind, as each scene serves to challenge what direction you think the narrative is going.

Millie is taken aback by the accusations, the venom spewed at her so undiscerningly and for all to see. We come to see Nina as an unstable figure reeling from some set of psychological problems. She becomes not just an unreliable narrator, but an unpredictable powder keg of emotion that could be set off at any moment. She baits Sweeney into traps, blames her for things that aren’t her fault, goes back on her promises (like allowing her to have Saturdays off), and punishes her for her own mistakes.

It’s unclear what she wants with Millie, whose connection with Andrew seems to be much more palpable than the fraught connection he has with Nina. Likewise, no one understands how Andrew puts up with his crazy wife with a sketchy, rumored past while he’s so compassionate, understanding, and likable.

Millie grows paranoid about the sexual tension between her and Andrew, the attention he continually wants to give her, the empathy and understanding he extends to her when at first it seemed he didn’t want her there. We see the direction this is going when she has a sex dream about Andrew and wakes up distressed, shouting “no” repeatedly as if to banish the idea from her psyche.

If you’re looking for a movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously, that plays with convention and pulpy performances but simultaneously has something to say about manipulation, female rage, rivalry, and solidarity, The Housemaid is your golden ticket.

This is the juicy set-up the film leaves you with before it goes berserk in the best way possible, mixing social commentary with deliciously campy performances and hilarious situational absurdity that had the entire theater’s sides in stitches. If you’re looking for a movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously, that plays with convention and pulpy performances but simultaneously has something to say about manipulation, female rage, rivalry, and solidarity, The Housemaid is your golden ticket.

Amanda Seyfried steals the show with a career-best, over-the-top performance that’s never phoned in and never tips into gimmick. The film lives or dies on its performances, and Seyfried dials hers all the way up in the most satisfying way possible. She has terrific chemistry with Sydney Sweeney, with a menacing undercurrent of rivalry that ultimately gets flipped on its head in the third act, an inversion that seems to echo offscreen as well.

As Sweeney faces mounting backlash from a string of PR controversies increasingly framed as box-office kryptonite, Seyfried appears to have taken her under her wing as a mentor, resisting the industry’s reflex to pit women against one another despite the risk of guilt by association. The will-they-be-friends-or-foes tension, on and off screen, is genuinely compelling.

Sweeney is serviceably passive for much of the film, a choice that works for the story, but it’s in the final act that she reveals surprisingly adept comedic chops and her filmography’s secret weapon: meta-commentary. As she recently told People, she “loves seeing movies that just fully embrace female rage,” and she leans into that impulse here with relish.

Without giving too much away, the story has a lot to say about the scapegoating of women, gaslighting, and identity forged outside proximity to male power. Sweeney’s public persona adds a few delicious layers to these vaguely feminist throughlines, which always feel like a not-so-subtle commentary on the public’s fascination with her body and the supposed incompatibility between sex symbol status and the posture of a serious actress with something to say.

Brandon Skelnar’s physicality and somewhat corny stage presence work brilliantly here, especially for the big pay-off. He’s genuinely believable as a hard-to-pull-off character. Other characters in the film, meanwhile, feel underdeveloped and aren’t given enough to do. Enzo, the groundskeeper, is given a lot of undue significance for someone who has very little presence and does too little to advance the plot. I don’t feel as though the plot justified his presence here.

Hopefully, Feig gets the opportunity to expand this world, and we get to see him become a more central figure in the next film. Andrew’s mother, likewise, is not fleshed out enough for me, given the implications of her eccentric relationship with her son. The film could also have spent more time developing the relationship between Cece and Millie.

Without giving away the big reveal, if you like horror films like Malignant or campy thriller comedies like A Simple Favor, The Housemaid is your ticket to unhinged, trashy indulgence that doesn’t hesitate to go there, with a dark, sinister core. Is it Oscar-worthy? No, but it never sells itself as that. In true Paul Feig fashion, it’s a popcorn movie through and through.

Audiences are defining it as the quintessential guilty pleasure of the year.

As for whether we’ll be getting a sequel, Sweeney says she’s onboard should she get the call, while Seyfried says they’ll absolutely franchise if the film does well. “If they make another one, I’ll be a part of it,” she said. Director Paul Feig expressed interest in continuing Millie’s story at the film’s premiere, telling The Hollywood Reporter, “If people show up and see it, I would love to see what Millie does next.”

If the box office is any indication, Sweeney seems to have broken her perhaps too prematurely declared “box-office curse,” with the film debuting to a strong $19 to $20 million domestically in its first weekend despite going up against heavy competitors like Avatar: Fire and Ash. With a budget of just $35 million, it’s on track to make back its budget domestically and is potentially the biggest opening for a Lionsgate film of the year. Currently, the film has a 75% critic score and a 92% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.

While The Housemaid flirts with nuggets of darkly compelling social commentary, it’s not setting out to be profound, sophisticated, or revolutionary. It’s somewhat overindulgent and, at times, incredibly on the nose. But it’s also cathartic, hilarious, cringeworthy, and always entertaining. Audiences are defining it as the quintessential guilty pleasure of the year, and you absolutely must watch this one in the theater for the full crowd-hollering experience. Fans of the book report the film as a faithful adaptation save for a particularly notable departure: the ending.