The Housemaid

January 30 – February 5

Saturday 7 pm
Sunday 7 pm
Monday 7 pm
Tuesday 7 pm
Wednesday 3:30 pm
Thursday 7 pm

Rated 14A – 2hr 9min
Thriller /Mystery

Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried star in a twisted domestic thriller that’s over-the-top and clever about It. Sweeney is the new housemaid hired by Seyfried’s ice-cold suburban princess. But you only think you know how things are going to unravel. The Housemaid, a screw-tightening domestic thriller, is nothing more (or less) than a garishly fun and effective piece of postfeminist pulp. Directed by Paul Feig, from a script (by Rebecca Sonnenshine) based on Freida McFadden’s hugely popular 2022 novel, the film goes right over-the-top, but it does so in a way that’s unusually clever and knowing. And as a sign of how movies are changing now, inching ever closer to fantasy over reality (even when they present themselves as taking place in “the real world”), “The Housemaid” almost feels like it could be a bit of a landmark.

Paul Feig is best known as a director of comedy (Bridesmaids, the Ghostbusters remake), but he straddled the line in the Simple Favor films, and here he straddles it in a new way, making a straight thriller with a hyperbolic edge. Feig, like a high-concept George Cukor, is drawn to bringing out female actors who go to operatic extremes, and in The Housemaid he builds a perfect stage for Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried to play a duet that keeps on giving because it keeps evolving. 

It starts off as a class war of the New Gilded Age, with the wealthy Nina practically lording it over the fact that Millie has nothing. Sweeney knows how to play a “nice girl” with a hint of not-so-nice layers, and she draws us into Millie’s victimhood so that we’re entirely on her side, even as we’re wondering how much of a manipulator there is at work in her. Sweeney is quite good (warm, distraught, quietly cunning), while Seyfried is nothing short of startling. She’s a great actor who’s usually intensely sympathetic, but in The Housemaid she comes on as a haughty harridan with some serious issues, and in a cold-as-ice way she’s hypnotic.

The Housemaid is a wildly entertaining thriller plunging audiences into a twisted world where perfection is an illusion, and nothing is as it seems. Trying to escape her past, Millie (Sweeney) accepts a job as a live-in housemaid for the wealthy Nina (Seyfried) and Andrew Winchester (Brandon Sklenar). But what begins as a dream job quickly unravels into something far more dangerous — a sexy, seductive game of secrets, scandal, and power. Behind the Winchesters’ closed doors lies a world of shocking twists that will leave you guessing until the very end. A sly throwback to the lurid thrillers that used to dominate multiplexes, The Housemaid cleans up nicely thanks to its wicked sense of fun and a delightfully unnerving performance from Amanda Seyfried.

Making sleeper hit thrillers used to be a staple of Hollywood, and they’d dearly love to know how to regularly repeat the trick and bring back that adult audience to the pictures. Big credit here for a tight, taut script by Rebecca Sonnenshine, based on a novel by Freida McFadden. The Housemaid delivers an emotional roller-coaster for sure, but once we get to Nina’s triangular room in the attic of the Winchester home, you might want to shield your eyes from the bloody results.