The Housemaid film review — Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried do battle in erotic thriller
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Here comes another vehicle for Sydney Sweeney — who seems these days to have more of them than Hertz. Directed by Paul Feig (Bridesmaids), The Housemaid is adapted from the bestseller by absurdly prolific thriller writer Freida McFadden. It’s the kind of film in which nothing is what it seems. The problem with making the sands constantly shift beneath the viewer’s feet is that people ultimately need some solid ground to stand on. Here that firm base is a generic set of assumptions designed to reassure us, then leave us cheering at the end. Everything is twisty — except the clichés, which come at us dead straight.
Sweeney plays Millie, a young woman who applies to work as live-in housekeeper in the opulent mansion of a moneyed couple. There appears to be something a little off about her (“Everything about me is a lie — even my glasses,” she confides in voiceover), but she can’t possibly be as off as the rich folks. They are the Winchesters — Nina (Amanda Seyfried) and Andrew (Brandon Sklenar), who is some kind of super-laid-back tech bro. They have a strangely formal young daughter (Indiana Elle), who shoots Millie a glare of supercilious disapproval when she first spies her dusting the Gauguin. There’s also a scowling hunk of a groundsman (Michele Morrone), and Andrew’s patrician mother, played by Elizabeth Perkins, who barely has any lines but exudes Arctic chill with just a flared nostril and an ermine-white coiffure.
Sklenar seems like the result of someone ordering a Ryan Reynolds with a dash of early Alec Baldwin, but decaf. Indeed, the film altogether resembles the kind of 1980s/90s erotic thriller that once would have starred Baldwin (or any other available Baldwin), down to a scene of torrid passion set to thunder, lightning and an ecstatic surge of soul singing (on the soundtrack, rather than on the mattress — there are limits).
The acting jury is still out on Sweeney, whose performance here is mostly solid: chipper, with hints of that ever-popular fragrance Dark Secret, but ramping up to enjoyably feverish towards the end. Seyfried, though, very entertainingly is febrile from the get-go as a woman with the uncanny knack of materialising unexpectedly whenever Millie shuts a mirrored medicine cabinet. The film is worth seeing just for the way she works those famous saucer eyes to look extra weird in a pallid mask-like face. In The Housemaid, Seyfried is the one who cleans up.
★★☆☆☆
In cinemas now
