To begin with, a notice to all bookworms. THE HOUSEMAID doesn’t come close to a faithful adaptation of
Freida McFadden’s best selling 2022 novel, foregrounding the easily digestible, style-over-substance shlock that made the book such a viral hit.The work by director Paul Feig and screenplay by Rebecca Sonnenshine keeps pulling out the rug from our narrative expectations, through the Hitchcock elements, and even the gallows humour, the intention of which is to make the eyebrow-raising goings-on as suspenseful as they are silly, is missing.
Even if this female-driven tale marches right up to the edge of horror, it is more in the tradition of a 1940s style melodrama pitting two female stars against each other. The only difference is it is on speed, a heightened operatic ride in which the dynamics between the three main characters are constantly changing so that you don’t know what has hit you by the time it ends.
Running over two hours, the entire thing sparks when Amanda Seyfried is on the screen, and flails when she’s not. Too bad it’s not called ‘The Housewife’.
Millie (Sydney Sweeney) arrives for an interview for the post of housemaid at a luxurious home where she’s not exactly grilled by hausfrau Nina ( a brilliantly nervy Amenda Seyfried) about her credentials. It’s clear Nina needs help to keep the house looking pristine, preparing meals, and for some occasional baby sitting for her seven-year-old daughter Cece (Indiana Elle), and covering for her husband Andrew (Brandon Sklener) who has one of those incomprehensibly high-paying jobs in it where it’s never made completely clear what he does–its shorthand enough nowadays to just say ‘IT’ and audiences will sagely accept any embarrassment of riches, like with this film.
This couldn’t be more different than Millies’ background which is fed to us slowly across the film’s runtime, but at the very beginning of the film we know that she’s sleeping in her car and is in desperate need of both work and shelter.
As luck would have it, the Winchester residence offers both, as it is a live-in position. Millie never expects to get it, but hey presto, she does. Nina shows her around, explains the role to her a bit more fully, and let’s her get settled in.
Millie slowly gleans that there’s a lot more in Nina’s background. Nina is hiding a slew of secrets, many of which point to a very turbulent, dangerous past which threatens to spill out into the present. The thing is the same could be said about Millie.
The film includes ideas about the great precariousness of living in America, even if even if it leads up to unlikely conclusions.
Certain people in the film live very unstable lives; the wealthy forget these people are there, or else they luxuriate in the cosy certainty that they call all the shots. At least, right up until they find out that they don’t.
The film’s cathartic even if cartoonish redress of this unfairness, particularly as it impacts upon women and women’s lives.(If that means a rather implausible veneer of solidarity at key points), then you can deal with it because by this point the film has shifted gears, ending as something quite fantastical and even grisly, which by the way sees Sweeney growing into the role, and its good to see these actresses playing such quirky roles.
