THERE’S A NEW SUBGENRE OF TRASHY MOVIES that try to sell trashiness and mediocrity by pretending to be wink-wink throwbacks to lurid 1980s and 1990s pulp. The ‘self-awareness’ is supposed to be their USP; the kitschy storytelling is supposed to be deliberate; the B-movie-ness is supposed to be part of the plan. Paul Feig’s The Housemaid, a psychological thriller based on Freida McFadden’s 2022 novel of the same name, squarely belongs in this category. It’s intense and erotic in a bad-literature sort of way, twisty and clumsy in a we-know-what-we’re-doing way, and incredibly corny for how smart and edgy it thinks it is. Every character looks porn-fantasy-coded hot, because how can they not? The gender commentary makes it worse. Every filmmaking choice is littered with tradwife riffs, over-the-top cliches and clunky red herrings to ‘fool’ the average viewer.
Still from The Housemaid.
The Housemaid appears to revolve around a young hustler named Millie — cosplayed by none other than Sydney Sweeney — who is hired as a live-in housemaid by a wealthy couple, Neena (Amanda Seyfried) and Andrew Winchester (Brandon Sklenar). Millie has a criminal record, which she keeps a secret, so the film obviously wants us to believe that she’s going to be trouble. She dresses skimpily around the house, of course, because Andrew is quite the hunk, as is the Italian gardener Enzo. She soon realises that she is no match for Neena, who seems to be schizophrenic, mercurial and has violent mood swings. Neena lashes out at everyone and everything, so it’s only a matter of time before poor hubby Andrew starts hitting on the blonde housemaid who cooks like she’s a male fantasy. The real twist arrives in the final act, when Millie discovers that the secret of the Winchesters has less to do with Neena than she thought.
Still from The Housemaid.
The problem isn’t the predictable premise or the book itself, which offers some rather cinematic ideas about invisibilized domestic agency, feminist rage and invisible predators. The conceit is not new; we saw it in Big Little Lies, and It Ends With Us, where the narratives lead us down a socially conditioned path of disturbed victims and broken survivors before revealing the sinister patterns of misogyny, gaslighting and abuse. These titles played from the perspectives of the female characters and protagonists, unfolding from their vantage points and trauma, and therefore baking the blind spots and biases into the stories. If the viewer doesn’t see it coming, it’s because the women weren’t wired to see it coming either.
Still from The Housemaid.
The issue with The Housemaid is that the filmmaking tries too hard to manipulate our perspective to be one step ahead. The devices are lazy. Like the random internal voice-overs of Millie. Or how she overhears the other rich housewives bitching about Neena behind her back; the film may as well tattoo the exposition on the screens. Or the fact that former single mom Neena is portrayed as a total nutcase so that we think she deserves the infidelity; Millie acts all coy and innocent until she doesn’t; Andrew acts like the biggest green flag because that’s what the film wants us to believe, not what the two women see. Even when the story changes track and shows us Neena’s backstory, it’s all so curated that the shame of judging her barely registers. By the time it returns to Millie as the protagonist who was once jailed for killing a rapist, the subtext of her journey is secondary to the go-girl machinations of the plot.
Still from The Housemaid.
Everyone’s playing a role for the audience, not as themselves. I get that it’s a thin line, but The Housemaid is too designed. It has a fetish for binaries. It ends up antagonising the very characters it later wants us to empathise with and cheer for. Even the casting is transparent. It uses the brooding-nice-guy stereotype that Brandon Sklenar played in It Ends With Us to throw us off, but it does this with the guile of a child giggling behind a sheer curtain during a hide-and-seek game. Ditto for its use of 365 Days actor Michele Morone, this sultry gardener whose enigma is that he isn’t as consequential to the plot as his chiselled and horny face suggests. When the revelations happen towards the end, the character transformations are abrupt — more gimmicky than earned. Sydney Sweeney seems to be parodying the world’s (not-wrong) perception of her, and it doesn’t work anymore. Seyfried overplays Neena just as the film wants her to, but the role-within-a-role part doesn’t land.
Still from The Housemaid.
They are essentially subservient to the film’s cloak-and-dagger tone, becoming different people instead of different versions of the same person. This compliance defines the irony of a ‘purposefully’ seedy thriller about sexy-misunderstood survivors and sexy-misinterpreted oppressors with mommy issues. In a parallel world, The Housemaid might have been a smutty satire of itself. But it is now a sleazy joke without a punchline. And can we just get done with Sydney Sweeney’s symbiotic relationship with the male gaze? Why make a whole film to weaponise her genes?
