If you see one ambitious Amanda Seyfried vehicle this holiday season, make it The Testament of Ann Lee (spoiler alert for my upcoming 2025 best-of-year list). But after that (or perhaps before that, since Ann Lee has yet to go into wide release), if you’re up for a bit of campy, frothy fluff which knows it’s a B-movie and wears that label proudly, see The Housemaid. It’s not necessarily a good movie in the strictest sense, but director Paul Feig knows exactly what he’s doing with the material, and thanks to him and his three lead actors, it turns out to be a very fun time.
Sydney Sweeney plays Millie, a young woman with a dark past, on parole, living out of her car, and desperate for a job. Enter Seyfried as Nina Winchester and Brandon Sklenar as her husband Andrew, along with Indiana Elle as their daughter Cecilia. The Winchesters are wealthy, organized, and stylish — at least on the surface. After a seemingly normal interview, Nina hires Millie as a live-in maid. Millie is preoccupied with keeping up appearances around her employers when Nina has a complete mental breakdown over PTA notes. She eventually returns to a calm, cool, and collected state, but soon has other overreactions which lead Millie to conclude that this is not the job for her, no matter how badly she needs it. However, before she can even think about spending the time it would take to find another job, she becomes entrenched even deeper in Nina’s mood swings, in addition to doing more than flirting with Andrew.
Both the film and the Frieda McFadden novel on which it’s based are being advertised on the strength of their twists, but to be honest, I can really only think of one in the film which would rise to the level of being a major spoiler. That twist is also the most obvious one there could possibly be to explain why Nina behaves the way she does. That’s certainly not helpful for memorability, but The Housemaid doesn’t feel like the type of mystery one needs to or would want to return to again and again. For the type of movie it is, though, that doesn’t really matter much. It’s meant to give the audience a shot of enjoyable adrenaline in a soapy way, and it does that rather well. Especially since there’s nothing in the film I would categorize as outright offensive, I don’t see any issue with recommending it purely on its B-movie strengths.
Feig and his crew photograph the proceedings quite handsomely, and that’s a big reason it all works as well as it does. Another reason is of course the cast, all of whom are throwing all their charismatic energy into this wobbly little household horror show, especially Seyfried. I also think the studio made a wise choice in allowing the film to earn an R rating, which allows for more feelings of consequence to the amount of sexuality and violence on display. They are cheap thrills, to be sure, but if they were neutered in a PG-13 context, they would feel even cheaper, and the audience this film is intended for — including and especially fans of the book — would probably feel talked-down to; cheated out of some of the fun of the experience.
Again, is The Housemaid a good movie? No. But is it a bad movie? I don’t really think so. Any story can be made interesting, and although the story here is absolutely preposterous, the way it is so professionally told made the film enjoyable to me, at least slightly beyond simply laughing at points where the filmmakers were not going for laughs. | George Napper
