THE HOUSEMAID is a 2025 thriller from director Paul Feig, the guy who did BRIDESMAIDS, THE HEAT and SPY, but remember he also did A SIMPLE FAVOR. This is in that vein: twisty, a little sexy, a little trashy, all in good fun. A romp.
Sydney Sweeney (THE MARTIAL ARTS KID) stars as Millie Calloway, who applies for a job as live-in maid for rich lady Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried, FIRST REFORMED) in her big ol’ gated estate. Millie lies about her experience, pretends to be overqualified, but narrates to us that she doesn’t know why she even applied, because a background check will reveal she’s a felon on parole. Wrong! She gets the job. Sydney Sweeney is… THE HOUSEMAID.
One red flag about the job is that on day one Nina excitedly welcomes her, saying “It’s gonna be fun, Millie!,” but gives zero explanation for why the house looks completely trashed, like there was a huge party and not one single thing was picked up afterwards. Millie cleans and cooks and gets a triangular attic room that’s decidedly not as nice as any other room in the entire house, but maybe she means it when she politely says “It’s perfect,” because it’s a step up for her. By the way, is it weird that the window doesn’t open and the door only locks from the outside and she has to ask a couple times before she gets the key for it? Eh, it’s probly nothing. Nina is really nice at first and we assume her little girl Cece (Indiana Elle) will warm up to Millie eventually. For now she just pouts and lectures her about fresh-from-the-dishwasher glasses being too dirty.
This is one of the ones where Sweeney simulates being an everyperson by wearing jeans. She doesn’t have to play down her trademark va-va-voom; when we meet her she’s living in her car and cleaning herself in gas station bathrooms, but she looks like Sydney Sweeney, which I support her right to do. She still manages to feel like an underdog because she’s in this bad situation where she’s forced into dishonesty in order to work, like Nic Cage at the beginning of RED ROCK WEST.
There’s immediate tension with Nina’s husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar, EMILY THE CRIMINAL, DROP): a little bit of the type where he comes home with takeout and had no idea a new person would be living in the house, but mostly the type where he’s hunky and very nice to her and they’re in close quarters. Pretty soon he’ll be wearing tank top undershirts with unusually visible nipples and sitting with her at 2 am watching Family Feud in the basement Nina has labelled “basically Andrew’s man cave.”
Very early in her housemaiding tenure Millie wakes up to the sound of Nina throwing a screaming fit, breaking things and claiming Millie lost her notes for the PTA meeting. Andrew calms her and gives Millie knowing “sorry about this” looks. As it turns into a job from Hell he’s always peacemaking and standing up for Millie and, as the genre demands, this connection grows into a forbidden attraction. It works in a romance-movie way because they become friends and they both deserve better than what they’re putting up with from his wife so the temptation is understandable. It seems.
You probly won’t be surprised though to hear that all is not as it seems. There will be a shift in perspective that completely rearranges our understanding of what’s going on, which is when it gets really fun. Though there are things going on with snoopy groundskeeper Enzo (Michele Morrone, SUBSERVIENCE) and Andrew’s terrible mother Evelyn (Elizabeth Perkins, THE FLINTSTONES, JIMINY GLICK IN LALAWOOD), there are still a limited number of possibilities for which character we’ve misunderstood or is secretly up to something. So some of the ways it switches up you may guess, but the specifics were a surprise to me, at least.
Sweeney’s Millie is a solid, fairly straight forward protagonist, leaving Seyfried lots of room to play around. She gets to do perky privileged-but-okay lady, totally-unreasonable-uptight-rich-lady, unhinged chaos tornado, and also some mores subtle frequencies in between. I was thinking this one didn’t have a performance to compare to Blake Lively in A SIMPLE FAVOR, but maybe that’s just because I was more familiar with Seyfried’s game, it wasn’t a surprise that she’d be good at this. Still, maybe I’ve undervalued her.
Once the movie shows all its cards we’re left with a villain to be vanquished, some tables to be turned, some medicine to be tasted, some satisfying moments when the mouse gets the upper hand and starts to taunt the cat. I like the construction of the screenplay by Rebecca Sonnenshine (AMERICAN ZOMBIE, Archive 81), based on a 2022 book by Freida McFadden, because right at the beginning when Nina gives Millie a tour of the house she jokes about dying on the weird spiral staircase. Feig and Sonnenshine know they’re not slipping one past us, they’re not trying to be sly, they’re just telling us where and how somebody’s gonna have to die at the climax. Announcing “This is a feature of the house that could kill someone.” It’s a little bit of a mystery which character will get it and how it will go down, but mostly it’s a promise. Stay tuned.
Also during the tour Nina jokes “you’ll definitely have to listen to his talk of how BARRY LYNDON is a misunderstood masterpiece.” I thought that was kind of a bad line, because who would misunderstand BARRY LYNDON in 2025? I don’t generally hear anybody talk about that movie unless they think it’s a masterpiece. But maybe that’s deliberate – a sign that he’s more basic than he thinks he is. Anyway I like that he never does bring it up but suddenly late in the movie we see Millie watching it on his TV.
A funny character detail about Andrew is that his mom is very precious about passing on the family china to him, and at first it seems like he’s just going along with it to be nice, but it turns out he really cares deeply about it. I heard somewhere that there are parents now disappointed because the younger generations don’t care about china, they don’t use those types of dishes. And I’m with them. So I take it as a sign that this guy is a dork.
This is a movie that’s knowingly pulpy but not apologizing for it. You get your deception, your flashbacks about crimes and mental hospitals, your smashed dishware and your infidelity. I think technically it qualifies as an erotic thriller, but I don’t want to overhype that aspect because 1) it’s not at all graphic 2) can we truly call it an erotic thriller if there’s not some voyeurism aspect and 3) Sweeney already did a more direct modernization of that genre that was in fact called THE VOYEURS.
If I had to choose I’d take THE VOYEURS over THE HOUSEMAID, and I also preferred AMERICANA and CHRISTY, the two flops Sweeney was raked over the coals for last year even though it was simply not reasonable for anyone to expect niche indie movies with almost no advertising to magically make a billion dollars just because a known actress was in them. This one was a big hit because it’s her in crowdpleaser mode. Like I’ve been saying, she’s good and she picks good movies. That’s the important thing.
I thought I remembered reading that there was going to be a sequel to THE HOUSEMAID, so pretty late into it I was wondering how the fuck that would work. I guess by having her get another job as a maid in another fucked up house, because it turns out there are two more books, and Sweeney and Feig will soon begin filming THE HOUSEMAID’S SECRET.
