I first turned acquainted with Freida McFadden’s New York Instances bestselling thriller ‘The Housemaid’ earlier in 2025, once I stumbled throughout a YouTube video entitled “Is that this the worst guide ever written?”. Intrigued by the title I clicked – the reviewer gave a detailed overview of McFadden’s guide, which issues a younger ex-con who takes a maid place in an prosperous upstate New York family solely to find her new employers aren’t as good as they seem like. Whereas “worst guide ever written” is probably a tad harsh, the novel is the kind of pulpy, first-person thriller that values surprising twists over elegant prose and located an viewers on TikTok due to its outrageous plot and “spicy” content material. With cash on the desk, it was solely a matter of time earlier than McFadden’s guide obtained a huge display adaptation. A shiny one at that, directed by Paul Feig – no stranger to soapy plots – and starring Amanda Seyfried, Brandon Skelnar and controversy magnet Sydney Sweeney.
That is nothing new – The Housemaid follows within the footsteps of Fifty Shades of Grey and the wildly profitable Colleen Hoover-verse (Hooveiverse?) that blew up the web with the offscreen drama surrounding Justin Baldoni’s adaptation of It Ends With Us earlier this yr. (Brandon Skelnar starred in In Ends With Us, which feels notable). That is however the newest chicklit pattern to mild up cinemas after the 2000s deluge of Nicholas Sparks adaptations and crime thriller period which peaked with Gone Girl and finally led to the Netflix parody miniseries The Lady within the Home Throughout the Avenue from the Lady within the Window. The Housemaid is a Frankenstein mixture of the 2 – there’s misogynistic violence and steamy romance between impossibly handsome film stars with shiny hair and glowing pores and skin, and each Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift songs on the soundtrack, thereby signposting the movie’s supposed viewers.
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In a manicured, festive imaginative and prescient of the New York suburbs, Millie (Sydney Sweeney) lands a gig as a housemaid for Andrew and Nina Winchester (Brandon Skelnar and Amanda Seyfried) plus their daughter Cecelia (Indiana Elle). The house’s different worker is monosyllabic groundskeeper Enzo (Michele Morrone, of Netflix’s equally soapy and profitable 365 Days franchise and Feig’s One other Easy Favor) who appears to immediately dislike Millie for unknown causes that will likely be conveniently revealed within the movie’s third act. Over a needlessly lengthy 131 minute runtime, Millie faces off towards the more and more erratic Nina whereas an attraction grows between her and Andrew.
Seyfried, to her credit score, does a first rate job of channeling Joan Crawford in No matter Occurred to Child Jane? together with her screaming, crying, throwing issues efficiency, whereas Skelnar is a serviceable main man, posing as the right husband to masks inside ill-intent. Sweeney is the weak hyperlink, unconvincing and picket as a powerful ex-con masquerading because the woman subsequent door, although it’s laborious to say how a lot is poor appearing and the way a lot is poor writing. As we crawl in the direction of the inevitable third-act reveal that has been foreshadowed at each alternative, The Housemaid is punctuated by intercourse scenes between Sweeney and Skelnar which stand in for character improvement (Skelnar bodily picks Sweeney up 5 instances in The Housemaid, which solely turns into funnier with every subsequent occasion) and supply transient reduction from in any other case tedious home squabbles between Seyfried and Sweeney.
However the plot devolves into violent chaos, so does its plausibility, as if the story beats are delivered in such fast succession as to bamboozle the viewers into going together with it. The Housemaid lacks the guile to rework its flaws into future camp traditional materials – it looks like a signal of the instances: a movie which holds the viewers’s hand at each flip whereas gesturing on the very actual situation of home violence, but retaining issues simply mild and attractive sufficient that nobody will likely be bummed out this vacation season.
