Watching The Housemaid, an adaptation of Freida McFadden’s eponymous 2022 novel, it’s hard not to wonder whether anyone involved in its production has ever made a movie before. The flow of shots is so chaotic, the script so outrageously dumb, the performances so clumsy, and the staging of scenes so risibly inept that all one can do is stare in disbelief. This is easily one of the worst films of the year.
And yet screenwriter Rebecca Sonnenshine (The Keeping Hours) and director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, Spy, A Simple Favor) are no strangers to the industry; neither are stars Amanda Seyfried (Hulu’s The Dropout miniseries), Sydney Sweeney (Clementine), and Brandon Sklenar (Drop), though I’d put the latter two in a very different category from Seyfried, who has proven herself over years of good work. Sweeney here demonstrates once again that all she can muster as cinematic persona is entitled teenager, time and again. That may have worked in Season 1 of HBO’s The White Lotus but serves nobody well in this particular story.
Sweeney plays Millie, a twentysomething woman just out of the slammer who is inexplicably engaged by Seyfried’s Nina to be housemaid and nanny to her tweenish daughter. Though we later learn why anybody in her right mind would pick someone with a forged CV and no references to work in her home, the reactions of everyone else in this universe to the hire still defy understanding, from Millie’s parole officer to the other wives in the neighborhood (who, to be fair, are all written as two-dimensional simpletons, so no wonder).
And then there’s hunky hubby, Andrew. His motivations will also later be revealed (via narrative sledgehammer), yet he otherwise is a character whose actions proceed from the instructions of the script rather than from any humanlike qualities. Yes, many of the onscreen folks turn out to be monsters, but a little bit of depth would go a long way to make us care about the outcomes. Plot spoiler: we don’t. Nor do we about the mysterious groundskeeper, Enzo (Michele Morrone, Subservience), who seems like he might be important yet ultimately is nothing but afterthought.
All of this is especially unfortunate since the underlying themes touch upon important issues, most notably toxic masculinity and twisted parenting. Perhaps if the producers had not cast Sweeney and Sklenar for their anatomies and found actors of skill, instead, the superficiality of the enterprise would be less glaring. In The Housemaid, everything is surface, however, from the grotesquely expositional voiceovers to the ludicrous sex scenes where Sweeney wraps her legs around her lover’s waist and gasps in purported desire. We don’t believe her for one minute. There is simply no there there—anywhere—to be found.
Christopher Llewellyn Reed
Chris Reed is the editor of Film Festival Today. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.