{"id":349440,"date":"2025-12-16T18:23:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T18:23:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/349440\/"},"modified":"2025-12-16T18:23:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T18:23:10","slug":"over-the-top-and-clever-about-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/349440\/","title":{"rendered":"Over-the-Top and Clever About It"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t\u201cThe Housemaid<\/a>,\u201d a screw-tightening domestic thriller, is nothing more (or less) than a garishly fun and effective piece of postfeminist pulp. Directed by Paul Feig, from a script (by Rebecca Sonnenshine) based on Freida McFadden<\/a>\u2019s hugely popular 2022 novel, the film goes right over-the-top, but it does so in a way that\u2019s unusually clever and knowing. And as a sign of how movies are changing now, inching ever closer to fantasy over reality (even when they present themselves as taking place in \u201cthe real world\u201d), \u201cThe Housemaid\u201d almost feels like it could be a bit of a landmark.<\/p>\n

\n\tA few decades ago, a movie like this one would have been about a deceptively innocent housemaid who gets hired by a pampered princess of a wife and mother. The housemaid, in that movie, would start off as nice, then begin to toy with situations in a sinister way, only to be revealed as a raging psycho. I\u2019m talking about the genre of films like \u201cThe Hand That Rocks the Cradle\u201d and \u201cSingle White Female.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first way \u201cThe Housemaid\u201d fools us \u2014 it won\u2019t be the last \u2014 is by pretending, for a few scenes, that it fits snugly into the interloper-from-hell genre. When Millie, played under a mane of shaggy rumpled curls by Sydney Sweeney<\/a>, shows up to be interviewed for a live-in housekeeper position at the suburban palace of Nina (Amanda Seyfried<\/a>), who runs her home in Great Neck, N.Y., with the cool hauteur of an efficiency expert, Millie comes on as all sweetness and light, peering through her I-wear-these-to-look-smart glasses, communicating how eager she is to get hired and do a great job. But after the interview, as she\u2019s driving away, she takes off the glasses, and a look of grim resign crosses her face like a cloud. The specs were a prop; her whole invitingly abashed personality was, perhaps, an act. We feel like we\u2019ve been here before.<\/p>\n

\n\tMillie lands the job, of course. And a scene or two later, after she once again pulls through the big metal front gate marked with a W (for Winchester) and into the private driveway, Nina shows her around the splendid, airy, sprawling three-story mini-mansion, with its chandelier lamp and chic dark-wood spiral stairway and endless tasteful trappings (her husband, a tech executive, designed every inch of the place). Millie\u2019s bedroom will be the renovated attic \u2014 one of those A-frame chambers that\u2019s either claustrophobic or cozy, depending on your vantage. Millie thinks it\u2019s heaven. As we learn, she\u2019s been living out of her car and has served time in prison; she needs this housemaid job like a life raft. Will she turn out to be crazy?<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first place the film turns the tables on us is when Nina, the movie\u2019s Real Housewife of Great Neck, turns out to be the one who seems nuts. In the morning, Millie discovers an unholy mess in the kitchen, and after she dutifully cleans it up, Nina accuses her of having thrown out the notes she made for her upcoming speech to the PTA. Those \u201990s thrillers used to build tension slowly, but not \u201cThe Housemaid.\u201d Aghast at losing the notes for her speech, Nina throws a plate-smashing tantrum, screaming out her rage, and we think: \u201cUh, maybe Millie should just quit?\u201d But according to the movie, she can\u2019t quit. She\u2019s got a parole officer who wants her to walk the straight-and-narrow, and threatens her with a return to prison if this job doesn\u2019t work out. That actually makes no legal sense, and feels like a rather junky contrivance. But you spin past it, because \u201cThe Housemaid\u201d is one of those movies you go with. It\u2019s too stylized, too entertainingly extreme, for you to get hung up on whether it all tracks.<\/p>\n

\n\tPaul Feig is best known as a director of comedy (\u201cBridesmaids,\u201d the \u201cGhostbusters\u201d remake), but he straddled the line in the \u201cSimple Favor\u201d films, and here he straddles it in a new way, making a straight thriller with a hyperbolic edge. Feig, like a high-concept George Cukor, is drawn to bringing out female actors who go to operatic extremes, and in \u201cThe Housemaid\u201d he builds a perfect stage for Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried to play a duet that keeps on giving because it keeps evolving. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt starts off as a class war of the New Gilded Age, with the wealthy Nina practically lording it over the fact that Millie has nothing. Sweeney knows how to play a \u201cnice girl\u201d with a hint of not-so-nice layers, and she draws us into Millie\u2019s victimhood so that we\u2019re entirely on her side, even as we\u2019re wondering how much of a manipulator there is at work in her. Sweeney is quite good (warm, distraught, quietly cunning), while Seyfried is nothing short of startling. She\u2019s a great actor who\u2019s usually intensely sympathetic, but in \u201cThe Housemaid\u201d she comes on as a haughty harridan with some serious issues, and in a cold-as-ice way she\u2019s hypnotic.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s not as if Nina\u2019s craziness is a total secret. Her backbiting friends on the PTA gossip about it, and about her highly dysfunctional backstory. All this despite the fact that Nina\u2019s husband, the burly, bearded, pin-up-handsome Andrew (Brandon Sklenar), appears to be the soul of virtue, with a winning smile for everyone. He and Millie start off friendly, then more, and we see why \u2014 in addition to looking like hook-up material, they\u2019re the only two sane adults in the household. And when they drive into the city to use the Broadway tickets that were purchased by Nina (it turns out that she had to go on a trip that day \u2014 which didn\u2019t stop her from reaming out Millie for ordering them), we think we know just where this is heading: into \u201cFatal Attraction\u201d territory. The surprise is that the twisty, and twisted, thriller gamesmanship is only just getting started.<\/p>\n

\n\tI feel compelled to reveal no more of \u201cThe Housemaid.\u201d It\u2019s a movie of diabolical developments, and that\u2019s what\u2019s captivating about it. That, and Elizabeth Perkins\u2019 droll performance as a mother-in-law from WASP hell, and the fact that in following the ins and outs that made the novel such a hit, the film creates an ideology of male-female relationships that\u2019s at once timely, glibly mythological, and born to be milked by a Hollywood thriller. There\u2019s a note of pop sadism at work in the material; \u201cThe Housemaid\u201d features scenes of people terrorizing each other in violently gaudy ways. Yet the scenes don\u2019t feel exploitative, because they express the characters\u2019 drives, and the audience is hanging on the outcome. In the thick of awards season, when those of us in the media are busy nattering on about prestige films, this is the kind of stylishly tricky high-trash movie that can steal some of the limelight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Housemaid,\u201d a screw-tightening domestic thriller, is nothing more (or less) than a garishly fun and effective piece…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349441,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[62309,49,48,75,79712,337,8917,79158],"class_list":{"0":"post-349440","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-amanda-seyfried","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-freida-mcfadden","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-sydney-sweeney","15":"tag-the-housemaid"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349440\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}