The Housemaid Review

The Housemaid is a domestic psychological thriller based on a novel by Freida McFadden and pits a young starlet and Oscar-nominated actress against each other.

Millie Calloway (Sydney Sweeney) is a young woman who served 10 years of a 15-year prison sentence. She applies for a job to be a live-in maid for a wealthy family in the suburbs of New York. The job quickly turns sour when her employer, Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried), gaslights the young woman, and Millie discovers that Nina has had a history of extreme mental health issues.

The Housemaid was a publishing sensation. The novel has already spawned two sequels and a short story, and the film was quickly greenlit. It was released on the same weekend as Avatar: Fire and Ash as a piece of counter-programming. The audience I was with was predominantly female. It won’t match Avatar’s box office numbers, but it will probably make a healthy profit. Films based on chick-lit have been lucrative, such as recent adaptations of Colleen Hoover’s novels.

The Housemaid was directed by Paul Feig, who has experience in the psychological thriller genre, having previously worked on the Simple Favor movies. The Housemaid shares some DNA with the first Simple Favor movie, as both films explore the dark underbelly of wealthy suburbia, feature seemingly nice characters who turn out to be not so nice, and reveal that people can be nasty when speaking about someone behind their back. Feig has mostly made comedy films, and even A Simple Favor had a comedic edge. The Housemaid had a slightly more serious subject matter: it even turned into a horror movie at one point. However, most of the film was over-the-top and campy.

The Housemaid was a film that required the audience to accept the preposterous. It was a twisty thriller where holes can easily be opened.  Anyone looking for tight and believable plotting will be hard-pressed to find it. This was a film that relied heavily on its characters and setting. It was a film set in Stepford Wives country. People lived in gated houses, and homes were immaculate. Nina was the picture-perfect all-American housewife, but that mask quickly slips when Millie gets the job. Nina was erratic, cruel, and gaslighted Millie in a performance that would make mental health advocates wince. It was a film that had a stereotypical view of schizophrenia. The Housemaid was a film that takes a too light-hearted approach to some serious issues, similar to It Ends With Us.

The filmmakers did set up mysteries and intrigue, and there was some suspense early in the film. There were questions like why there was a lock on Millie’s bedroom, and Nina’s 7-year-old daughter, Cece (Indiana Elle), acted cold and strange for a girl her age. As a detective, Millie was useless. Any information she obtained was through conversations with other women; she didn’t do any investigating. The Housemaid did share some ideas with Gone Girl and Side Effects, but it was not as prestigious or thought-provoking as those two films.

2025 has been seen as a bad year for Sydney Sweeney. She was in the centre of a controversy due to an American Eagle jeans advert, and her recent films (Americana, Eden, and Christy) flopped at the box office. She was able to bounce back with The Housemaid, due to it being a studio film based on a popular novel. Sweeney was the best performer in the film since she had to take Nina’s abuse on the chin or else she’d be back in the slammer. Sweeney’s Millie was a tough girl, hardened by a harsh life experience, and she was able to exhibit a playful side even after the darkest of experiences. It will be interesting to see how the YouTube chuds will react to the film since they have tried to co-op Sweeney as one of their own, and they will get excited to see her naked in The Housemaid, but she was leading a film that turns overtly feminist.

The Housemaid fails in two ways. Anyone wanting a tightly crafted thriller will find The Housemaid frustrating, whilst, as a silly romp, there were times the film was too dark and serious.