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The Cheesy Tensions of The Housemaid

The Housemaid is trash. That is its genre, not a judgement: sensationalist wine-mom trash. And as trash it does its job fairly well with the requisite high drama, sexy tension, and visceral twists. Like many a pillar of this new form it is based on a novel, a 2022 bestseller by Freida McFadden, and comes courtesy of director Paul Feig, who has adopted this genre in lieu of comedy since his surprise 2018 hit A Simple Favor. Though I haven’t seen that film myself I don’t expect  its fans will be either too surprised or too upset with what he has done with this material, which similarly weans its drama off a relationship between two women.
Set in the wealthy suburbs of Long Island, the film follows Millie, played by Sydney Sweeney, who attains a job as a live-in maid for the Winchester family. Secretly, she is a homeless young woman on parole after ten years in prison, utterly surprised to get the job. Through her interview and first day, her immediate boss Nina (Amanda Seyfried) presents as a cheerful and excited though naive socialite with a spoiled daughter Cece (Indiana Elle). But very soon she reveals crueler tendencies, scapegoating and gaslighting Millie over issues that arise, giving her contradictory orders, and expressing paranoia around a manner of things, including a perceived closeness between Millie and her husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar), soon the only person to come to Millie’s defence.
Nina’s backstory is teased out by the script gradually through the first half of the film -though clumsily in several places. Both the reveal of her time in a mental hospital and the reason why she was there come up through very hackneyed devices and inorganic gossip. Indeed, a lot of information is relayed in such an awkward manner, Millie’s inner monologue occasionally surfacing in the form of a personal diary to more directly translate her perspective as it is likely characterized in the book. A similar device comes later in a perspective shift that also feels a touch contrived -some of the exposition needs such a blunt outlet, but other parts of it could be expressed more creatively.
Feig is not a very creative director though and the screenplay here -whether derived from the novel or taking liberties- isn’t particularly strong in action or dialogue, which is stilted and inauthentic in that manner of pulp romance novels. Most of the first half of the film concerns the mystery that Millie is unraveling about Nina -all of it so perfectly by-the-numbers psychotic it trains your suspicions contrary to what it seemingly intends to lay out. Granted, and this doesn’t seem to be the fault of screenwriter Rebecca Sonnenshine, the big twist of the film isn’t difficult to see coming from very early on. From the first morning that Nina reveals her true colours, I could surmise where it was actually going. The contours of a very conventional thriller are laid out for a long while, but this kind of movie at this time certainly wasn’t going to be going there. And perhaps this was conscious foreshadowing in the form of dull plotting, hollow character points, and obvious misdirects -but they are still trying on audience intelligence for as long as they manifest.
Millie is a bit of an empty vessel for a big chunk of this, the character meant to be both discerning and naive, sometimes in the same scene. Sweeney broadly makes the best of it (though her voiceover leaves much to be desired), she’s played this type before. It’s not until the latter parts of the movie and a separate twist that casts her in a darker light (albeit one in which heroism is still dimly grafted on), that she breaks out into a slightly more engaging protagonist. But the real juice of the movie, for the long stretches on either side of its bombshells is Amanda Seyfried. Between her, Sweeney, and Sklenar, she most understands the tenor of the material and is having fun with it. Nina is the most dynamic personality to start, oscillating between pleasantness and intense bitterness, and there are further dimensions that open up as the movie goes along. And Seyfried is engaging and entertaining through all of them, whether in ratcheting up tension through her intonations or revealing sympathetic traits to this seemingly monstrous woman. The movie already has a few nuggets in common with Jennifer’s Body, and this might be the first time since then that Seyfried has let loose so well. As her impossibly perfect and handsome husband, Sklenar does the job aptly in what winds up being a nifty parallel to his performance in Drop earlier this year -both films weaponizing his natural image of masculine sexuality in roughly the same way, but to different outcomes. His chemistry with Sweeney here is unsurprisingly quite sizzling.
The subject matter of this film might invite discussions of class, but apart from the reliance Millie has on the job and the connection to Andrew’s generational wealth posited as a factor in Nina’s erratic behaviour, the wealth gap doesn’t manifest much as a theme of the movie -especially given the absence of any life Millie is allowed to have outside of this household. However, the power of wealth on its own is a background element -the symbiotic way that the wealthy project themselves onto others and are in return projected on is addressed. Millie finds she has no escape from the awful behaviour towards her due to the reputations of Nina and Andrew, their personalities and their marriage. This is also of course linked to gender and the power dynamics there. It winds up being a fundamental aspect of the movie in an extreme way that also acts out something of a feminist fantasy. This of course after a different kind of sexual fantasy very much in line with the trappings of the trash genre, particularly with regards to romance. The movie does subvert this but not before milking it; again, it knows its audience, trying its best to have its cake and eat it in terms of its thematic integrity. Its commitment to hyperbole perhaps gets in the way of that -the final scenes of the movie have some unmistakably cheesy beats.
In all of this there are a few potentially interesting elements left on the back-burner -Cece, her attitude, cognizance, and evolution in her feelings towards Millie aren’t much explored, nor is a mysterious groundskeeper Enzo (Michele Morrone), who appears to know what’s really going on but whose role in the story is incredibly minute in the end. Things that may have complicated the movie too much and not contributed to its quality, but curiosities nonetheless unaddressed. The Housemaid is in some parts entertaining and thrilling, in spite of its poor script and dramatic shortcomings. Predictable though it may be, its plot twists do keep it in a fluctuating shape, and Seyfried takes to that especially well. But it is not the most exciting or original kind of trash that it could be.

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