R | 2h 11m | Thriller, Suspense | 2025
“Though good for a chuckle, ‘Adulthood' should have ultimately gone with either full crazy or full misery—either commitment would have been more satisfying.”
In the case of “The Housemaid,” it needed to either belly-flop into outright parody and camp, or swerve into a dark, psychotic place like David Fincher’s “Gone Girl.”
Feig instead attempts a balancing act, and the result is predictably blah; it’s not exploitative enough to be fun and not edgy enough to be thrilling. Plot twists can be seen coming a mile off, and the performances of the two currently incandescent, famous female leads, while satisfactory, can’t rescue the movie from mediocrity.
Fresh Out of Prison
The film’s central character, Millie Calloway (Sydney Sweeney), is a quiet, unassuming young woman who is living out of her car and struggling to find work so she can meet the terms of her parole. A job as a live-in housemaid for monied suburbanite Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried) seems too good to be true.
Millie gets a cute attic bedroom all to herself. But what about this deadbolt on the door that locks from the outside? How come the singular window doesn’t open? Are those fingernail scratches on the door?
Millie—surprise, surprise—soon learns that calling Nina bipolar is like calling Mike Tyson a pugilist. Nina’s daughter, Cece (Indiana Elle), is cold and aloof. Nina’s husband, Andrew Winchester (Brandon Sklenar), is soap opera hunky—6 foot 2, fabulous hair, pumps iron, and makes piles of money.
Performances
Amanda Seyfried, completing a harrowing performance in “The Testament of Ann Lee,” back-to-back with “The Housemaid,” chews the scenery admirably, considering all that movie-making must have left her exhausted. Nina’s a monstrously unhinged presence, but she reigns it in enough to make the third act change-up plausible.The main problem is Brandon Sklenar’s Andrew. He obviously looks the part of a romance novel hero and soap opera dreamboat, and with another director might have had more chemistry with Sweeney.
These kinds of tall, dark, handsome actors—Josh Duhamel also comes to mind—tend to have rom-com ability in spades. They have a built-in nobility, ooze charm and humor—they’re the Lover archetype, and they were the high school quarterbacks. Amusingly, both Sklenar and Duhamel actually were college quarterbacks.
It’s when Lover archetype guys try to get mean and dangerous and attempt to be early-career De Niro that they falter: They don’t carry that degree of darkness. Scott Eastwood is another handsome hunk who’d really like to be considered scary but can never convincingly pull it off, no matter how many wicked-looking scars he applies to his model face. Same goes for his dad.
Made well, this kind of slick, commercial yarn has the potential for a deliciously lurid two hours, but “The Housemaid” can’t get scary enough to draw adult viewers into its web. Teens will most likely get a kick out of it, though.
