Director Paul Feig delivers twists and turns aplenty in his adaptation of Freida McFadden’s thriller novel of the same name, The Housemaid.
BookTok phenomenon
A best-seller and a BookTok phenomenon, McFadden’s novel is brought to life by a stacked cast of Sydney Sweeney, Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar, who play the main characters, Millie Calloway, Nina Winchester and Andrew Winchester.
The film opens with Millie (Sweeney), a young woman with a criminal record, driving to the luxurious home of the wealthy Winchester family. Millie arrives wearing glasses and greets Mrs Winchester (Seyfried) politely when she arrives for a job interview there. She’s applying for the role of housemaid, even though her résumé states that she has a college degree and years of work experience. Millie doesn’t, however, have either, nor does she even wear glasses. In fact, she’s living in her car and is desperate to find a new job after she was fired from her last one. To her disbelief, Mrs Winchester calls back to offer her the position, but, after Millie excitedly accepts her offer, it’s only a matter of time before she starts to notice cracks appearing in their perfect family façade.
What follows is a solidly entertaining thriller, full of suspense and deception and anchored by a performance from Seyfried that works better over the course of the film and eventually becomes the standout (Sweeney and Sklenar are both adequate, but you can’t help but feel their characters are a little one-note). Seyfried’s portrayal of Mrs Winchester tilts from smiley and respectable to deranged and emotional, seemingly in an instant, demonstrating great range but perhaps flipping so drastically that it leaves little room for real depth or character development. Indeed the film as a whole is lacking in emotional depth, but was arguably never selling itself as much more than a pulpy thriller which doesn’t take itself too seriously. It covers familiar ground (wealth and domesticity masking something darker), but is entertaining from start to finish.
As more details are revealed about Nina’s past and her too-good-to-be-true husband, Andrew (Sklenar), things start to unravel, eventually culminating in a shocking and graphic finale. Though there are some moments of quite obvious foreshadowing early on in the film, you’re largely left guessing until the very end, which was changed from the original ending in the book. McFadden, who served as an executive producer on the film, described the altered ending as “better than the book”, while Feig told People that he stayed true to the book, but “added an extra ending onto it”. How this goes down with fans remains to be seen, but on balance the third act of the film is probably the most successful of the three.
Though flawed – the pacing, too, renders the first two acts a bit of a slog compared to the third – The Housemaid is a tense, campy crowdpleaser that effectively blends domestic drama with psychological thriller, and touches (in a limited way) on themes of childhood trauma and domestic abuse. It’s best seen with an audience for those shocking scenes, and for some perhaps unintentionally funny ones, too, and for viewers unfamiliar with the book, it’s best to go in blind.
The Housemaid releases in UK cinemas on Boxing Day, fitting since not only are the streets of New Jersey lined with snow when Millie first pulls into the Winchesters’ driveway, but also because this dysfunctional family’s flags are all the colour of the suit worn by the man in the sleigh – bright, bright red.
