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Paul Feig is one of those directors where the second his name comes up, you start doing the mental math of whether this is going to be worth your time, because the guy has made some funny stuff in the past and also some stuff that felt like it was running purely on goodwill and nothing else, one production I remember he work on was Minx the TV series that was pretty good on its first season although idk if it still alife, so when my wife picked this for movie night, as a good geeky movie guy Im pick up the IMDB url and check who was on this besides your dear friend Sydney Sweeney. I kept things cool, neutral and started preparing to be politely bored for two hours. What actually happened was that The Housemaid grabbed you by the neck, almost like sit down I got you attention now, right out of the gate and did not let go, and that is not something I say about a domestic thriller lightly because that genre has been coasting on cheap execution and streaming budgets for years now, pumping out content that you forget before the thing end you are like what ever. The movie builds the story of Millie, played by Sydney Sweeney, a woman who just finished a ten year stretch and is trying to claw her way back to something close to what anyone would call a normal life, so when a live as housemaid opens up with the Winchester family out in Long Island, she takes it without asking too many questions, and the movie is smart enough not to ask them for her either, it just drops you into that house and lets everything you are supposed to feel settle in on its own time because as the movie goes many things about the family starts to uncover. That attic bedroom that only locks from the outside is the kind of nasty little detail that tells you immediately what kind of movie you are in, and Feig plants it early and just lets it sit there the whole time like poking at your brain.
- IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27543632/
- Platform: Starz
Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried are both doing real work here and that combination is the main reason this thing rises above although this movie is not ground braking or anything that will make you remember it for days but to be honest it seems like the internet love it and want more out of it, it truly would not be strange if they do a TV series about it. For the most part the story gets your attention when Seyfried as Nina, the wife who swings between warm and completely unraveled, accusing Millie over misplaced notes and unexplained household incidents, she is playing a character with so many faces that you cannot get a read on her from scene to scene, and that kind of performance requires serious control to keep from going off the rails, and Seyfried never drops it. Brandon Sklenar as Andrew, the husband, walks in with this whole Bruce Wayne energy where the charm make the guy look so slick and polish, so deliberate that you almost cannot blame anyone around him for buying it completely, and the way he positions himself as the only sane and reasonable person in a house full of chaos is smooth enough that you just got to remember you have to stay suspicious because this mfs cant be trusted, some things are just too nice to be true. The house itself is doing a lot of work too, all white walls and dark corners and that attic pressing down on everything from above, and the movie itself uses the space the way good thriller atmosphere should, making you feel like every room is holding something back from you. Feig also uses early scenes to get you rooting for exactly the wrong outcomes, which is a gut move that takes actual confidence in your work as a director to pull off and I got to say this movie was killing my wife, almost like it was one of this Mexican soap opera.
Now it expected that content like this would be draggy if you are not fully committed to it, sometimes it almost felt like scenes were glue together since they loose rhythm here and there, there are moments where the logic does not fully click into place until the next piece of information arrives to patch the gap, and that creates a slump early in the movie where you are working harder than you should have to keep trying to guess whats going to happen next or even keep up the thread of the story and Im not sure if its be design but it felt wrong, when you have to think too much during a movie it just feels bad. Elizabeth Perkins shows up as Andrew's mother and she has exactly enough screen time to make you realize they cast someone great and then gave her absolutely nothing to do with it, like why most of the time they have to do this with the wife in the story? they cast someone great probably just to grab the audience attention but the role is crap, she could do so much more, remember her days on Weeds tv series, after all frustrating waste of time as she just disappears in the back. A couple of the story mechanics also fit together a little too perfectly in the back half, the kind of convenient click where you can feel the screenplay deciding things rather than letting them happen, things become too predictable and cliche but I guess there is that soap opera dna, and at the end it all felt rushed to close out its loose ends in a way that suggests someone ran out of either time or ideas and just punched it to the finish line. It is not enough to sink the movie but it is enough to leave a slightly incomplete feeling if you are paying close enough attention.
The nineties erotic thriller is the obvious reference point for what The Housemaid is going for and the closest comparison is The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, where domestic space functions as a trap and politeness is just another weapon everybody is quietly loading, this is a family worst nightmare to a certain point almost like sleeping with the enemy and Feig actually manages to make that formula feel like it still a relevant style rather than just being a nostalgia reboot that feels flat, the movie during many moments have enough character to keep you interested. The humor is very very dialed way back compared to the 90s era where the jokes were basically firing at you not improvise but systematically one after another on choose scenes just to keep things funny, what I mean by this is that the movie doesnt have too many funny moments but enough to break the ice, it leans more into the drama and the psychological terror, and the restraint in been fun is noticeable because the comedy that does appear is being used to crack the pressure open for a second before letting it build again. From my understanding this is actually based on content a book that I have not touched and probably never will to be honest, I have said it many times, Im not a reader so I cannot speak to how faithful any of it is, but my wife was online looking up the novel before the movie was even all the way finished, she is a reader and that is probably the most positive argument for me from this movie, not a movie that I enjoy that much, very meh in my opinion.
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