{"id":354225,"date":"2026-09-23T03:18:55","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T03:18:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/354225\/"},"modified":"2026-09-23T03:18:55","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T03:18:55","slug":"the-housewife-review-naomi-watts-anchors-an-underpowered-true-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/354225\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Housewife’ Review: Naomi Watts Anchors an Underpowered True Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tLong before the relevant authorities do, you\u2019ll figure out the secret that immigrant homemaker Hermine Ryan (n\u00e9e Braunsteiner) holds close to her chest in \u201cThe Housewife<\/a>\u201d \u2014 a giveaway that may be the fault of some heavy-handed direction and scripting, but speaks to the detail and integrity of Naomi Watts<\/a>\u2018 lead performance, which often seems a step ahead of the film around her. A true story of a Nazi-hunting case in mid-1960s New York City, Ben Shirinian<\/a>\u2018s debut feature is most absorbing as a character study of a woman lying to herself, at least as much as she\u2019s lying to everyone else. It\u2019s the procedural thriller around her, probing at that deception, that feels undercooked, with neither Tye Sheridan\u2019s investigating journalist nor Michael Imperioli\u2019s immigration officer much of a foil for Watts\u2019 more layered protagonist.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis is ambitious material for a new filmmaker, and while Shirinian (a native of Montreal, where this mostly Queens-set film was shot) directs it with handsome gravity, he has a tendency to double down on signposting that\u2019s already in the script by Alyssa Hill, also a first-timer. Still, with its burnished period production values and tony cast \u2014 also including an oddly underused Luke Evans and a briefly potent Lena Olin \u2014 this is the kind of older-skewing upscale drama that could do respectable arthouse business outside the awards corridor. <\/p>\n

\n\tFrom the start, there\u2019s a nervous brittleness to Hermine\u2019s permanently pasted-on smile, though there could be any number of reasons for that. Having moved to the States with her husband Russell (Evans) after they met in post-WWII Austria, she has lived in New York for nearly a decade, but is aware she doesn\u2019t quite fit in \u2014 beginning with her still-strong Germanic accent \u2014 and as the film begins, her looming U.S. citizenship interview is causing her much anxiety. But perhaps she frets too much: The local church women have embraced her as one of their own, her oatmeal raisin cookies are much in demand, and when the dreaded interview comes around, she easily impresses official Anthony DeVito (Imperioli) with her earnest-sounding American Dream spiel.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou can be anyone you want to be,\u201d she says in praise of her new home country \u2014 our first, unsubtle clue that everything is not entirely as it appears. When New York Times reporter Joseph Lelyveld (Sheridan) turns up on her doorstep requesting to speak with her husband, she seems less surprised than you might expect: He hasn\u2019t told her that he\u2019s acting on a tip from famed Austrian Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal (an oddly sidelined figure in the film\u2019s version of events), but perhaps she wouldn\u2019t be entirely surprised if he did. <\/p>\n

\n\tShirinian and Hill engage in some labored obfuscation \u2014 chiefly by delaying our first encounter with Russell to a suspicious degree \u2014 to engineer a narrative twist of sorts, but it\u2019s more trouble than it\u2019s worth: Viewers needn\u2019t be acquainted with the facts of the real-life case to guess the truth well ahead of time, not least because the character of Hermine, and Watts\u2019 simultaneously tricky and disarming playing of her, is so clearly the film\u2019s driving force. A woman whose story, once tested, changes so often you wonder which version she believes, she\u2019s sufficiently interesting to anchor the film without any need for strategized reveals and reversals.<\/p>\n

\n\tSheridan\u2019s callow journo, by contrast, never feels like more than an information-gathering device, not helped by the phonily expositional nature of much of his dialogue \u2014 which occasionally goes so far as to insult the audience\u2019s intelligence. (\u201cAfter the war?\u201d he asks gormlessly, when Hermine mentions that she married in 1958.) A suggested ripple of May-December attraction between his and Watts\u2019 characters initially intrigues, but goes largely unexplored. \u201cThe Housewife\u201d has little interest in perverse or ambiguous territory as it pivots, in its third act, to a somewhat cursory courtroom drama.<\/p>\n

\n\tEven Watts\u2019 hitherto finely measured character gradations are suddenly a bit compressed in this denouement, though Olin, as a Holocaust survivor bearing crucial, ugly truths, gets two scenes to quietly burn everything down. Shirinian brings \u201cThe Housewife\u201d in at a brisk 102 minutes, though after the coy slow burn of its first hour, the rest could use as much breathing room. Just as the film gets risky, it rushes to the finish line \u2014 and away from its most riveting, unreliable perspective. But it\u2019s a welcome reminder of what Watts, who\u2019s been either ill-used or unchallenged in too many of her recent film vehicles, can do with a role that steps up to her adaptable, slightly unknowable screen presence. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Long before the relevant authorities do, you\u2019ll figure out the secret that immigrant homemaker Hermine Ryan (n\u00e9e Braunsteiner)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":354226,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[132099,30207,9,24,63,122,124,123,132100,126259],"class_list":["post-354225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-ben-shirinian","tag-naomi-watts","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news","tag-the-housewife","tag-toronto-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/354226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}