Some stories just work. As long as you make it different enough, people will be coming back. One of those tales is a bored married couple, and a sexy ingenue that saunters into their lives. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle just did it earlier this year! And now comes the bigger crazier The Housemaid, ready to draw in the now college/young adult Euphoria fans into Sydney Sweeney’s latest erotica.
Sweeney plays Millie, a homeless, ex con living out of her car in Long Island (um, sure). Desperate to get a job and stay out of prison, Millie gets hired as an au pair by the wealthy Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried) to watch Nina’s daughter Cece (Indiana Elle). Millie hopes to keep her head down and keep her new live in job…but basically impossible when Nina’s sleeveless bulky tech wizard hunk husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar, um, double sure) comes home from work, and everyone locks eyes with one another.
Paul Feig and writer Rebecca Sonnenshine have a lot of fun adapting Freida McFadden’s novel. The first hour of this movie follows the Adrian Lyne/Lifetime movie model with more flair. We get on the nose winking like “ah, the spiral staircase, it’s gonna be the death of me” 5 minutes into the film. Amanda Seyfried is having a blast here, really dialing it up for the screen. Feig shoots Nina like she’s an animatronic doll that comes preprogrammed with one happy line, then one angry line of dialogue, and looks like she’s ready for violence if Millie or Andrew say the wrong thing. Sydney Sweeney has equal fun playing off of her, using the glasses and her, um, features to push Seyfried to the next level. Brandon Sklenar is the eye candy middleman, with the two women; well, all the women in the neighborhood, vying for his attention. There’s a level of cheesiness that walks the credulity line but mostly works, especially because of Seyfried’s loose cannon of a performance.
The middle is where things get interesting. Without spoiling, the story starts swerving for the audience. All the choices the actors have been making start looking different in our new light, and make some of the stranger moves in that unhinged first hour make more sense. Props to Feig for making it all make sense, but sticking to the genre, and finding the right mixture of sexy, but also very scary. Some of the things we learn are wonderfully chilling and grow as more gets revealed. The SSSizzling trio of Sweeney, Seyfried, and Sklenar sell the sh*t out of the tale, using every part of that beautiful Long Island home to maximum entertainment for everyone.
There are at least 2 more novels Freida McFadden wrote. That alone gets me giddy. If we get anything as fun as The Housemaid, then lets keep this going. I will say though, this is a weird date night movie; though it’s very possible I’m underestimating the true crime adjacent nature of this film…and Sydney Sweeney’s magnetism.