The Housemaid (United States, 2025)

When one approaches something like The Housemaid, one has to go with reasonable expectations. Freida McFadden's book, a perfect summer beach read, is the kind of page-turner that can easily be consumed in a few lengthy sessions. Transforming it from page to screen required a touch that absolutely, positively has not yet been evident in the work of director Paul Feig, who botched the similarly twisty, trashy A Simple Favor and Another Simple Favor. Feig, better known for his middling comedies, can't seem to get the tone right. The Housemaid either needs to veer into outright parody or nestle into the dark, psychotic space where David Fincher took Gone Girl. Instead, Feig tries to find a middle road and the result is predictably mediocre. The movie isn't exploitative enough to be fun and isn't edgy enough to be thrilling. The twists are telegraphed and land with a thud, the performances are all over the place, and the movie looks and feels like something originally planned for a direct-to-streaming release.

Pacing issues are as big a stumbling block as tonal inconsistencies. The movie's first half plays like a bad soap opera with little in the way of thriller elements. It's a long slog of a setup. Then, once things heat up with a twist so obvious that a blind person wouldn't have missed it, it decides to pause for about a quarter hour to get us caught up on a backstory that couldn't be told earlier (because it would "ruin" the twist). It's possible to get away with this sort of thing in a novel – taking a few chapters off to go back in time – but it doesn't work in a film to pause an ongoing narrative for about 15 minutes to exhume events that happened before the movie began. There are presumably ways around this but Rebecca Sonnenshine didn't uncover them during the screenwriting process.

The film's central character is Millie Calloway (Sydney Sweeney), a seemingly timid young woman who is struggling to stay employed and housed so she can meet the terms of her parole. An offer of employment as a live-in housemaid for wealthy socialite Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried) seems like manna from heaven. Not only does Millie get cushy employment but she has the attic bedroom for her own. (And who cares if the deadbolt on the door locks from the outside?) But Millie soon learns that dreams and nightmares share the same space. Nina has an unstable, bipolar personality – kind and supportive one moment, bitchy and vindictive the next – and her young daughter, Cece (Indiana Elle), is unfriendly. Ah, but at least Nina's husband is a hunk. Andrew Winchester (Brandon Sklenar) is the embodiment of every woman's fantasy and his kindness toward his new employee makes her heart go pitter-patter. The more Nina sees her husband and her new housemaid engaged in a too-obvious flirtation (one that inexplicably involves the late, great Richard Dawson), the greener her eyes become.

Amanda Seyfried finds the right tone, making Nina into a monstrously unstable presence. With an unhinged, over-the-top performance, Seyfried lets us know that she understands what The Housemaid is (or at least should be). Sydney Sweeney, however, spends far too much time trying to make Millie likeable, which results in a too-subdued portrayal – at least until the final act. The biggest problem, however, is Brandon Sklenar, whose Andrew is a void. Instead of being a romance novel figure come to life, he's a rather boring cardboard cut-out. He has zero chemistry with Sweeney, which makes their attraction feel like a screenplay's construct. Michele Morrone (as Enzo the gardener) and Elizabeth Perkins (as Andrew's Mommy Dearest, Evelyn) hover around the periphery, promising to be more consequential than they are.

One of the biggest problems with The Housemaid is that it keeps reminding us of better movies, creating expectations it fails to deliver. Made well, this sort of material has the potential for a deliciously lurid two hours. But Feig's lack of aptitude with the material results in a cheap and artificial product, never really drawing the viewer into its web and spinning an overlong yarn that fails to embrace an identity. This is another failure on Feig's surprisingly successful but distressingly thin resume.

The Housemaid (United States, 2025)