Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Paul Feig
Starring: Sydney Sweeney, Amanda Seyfried, Brandon Sklenar, Michele Morrone, Elizabeth Perkins
There's enough gaslighting in The Housemaid to illuminate Times Square. Director Paul Feig and screenwriter Rebecca Sonnenshine's adaptation of Freida McFadden's pulpy bestseller puts three good-looking people in an even better looking Long Island home and unspools a series of manipulations that leave us to guess just who are the gaslighters and gaslightees in this scenario.
Recently released from a decade in prison for an initially unmentioned crime, Millie (Sydney Sweeney) takes a job as live-in housemaid for wealthy couple Nina (Amanda Seyfried) and Andrew Winchester (Brandon Sklenar). All seems well until Millie wakes for her first morning on the job to find an irate Nina tearing apart the kitchen and accusing her of throwing away notes she had written for a PTA meeting. After he calms his wife down, Andrew explains that Nina has been under a lot of stress lately, and that Millie shouldn't take it personally.
But that's just the beginning of a campaign of relentless gaslighting on the part of Nina, who assigns various chores to Millie, only to later claim she gave no such instructions. Nina seems mad as a bag of frogs, but given how Andrew and Millie insist on walking around with their best assets on display while making googly eyes at one another, maybe she's right to be paranoid. Just who is out to get whom here?
Best known for his female-centred comedies, Feig has already proven himself an ill-fit for the thriller genre with A Simple Favor and its unfeasibly awful sequel. Once again he puts the building blocks in place but doesn't know how to construct this sort of movie in an appropriately suspenseful manner. Plot reveals arrive either too early or too late to land with the right impact. We're told off the bat that Millie is just out of the big house, when concealing this information from the audience could have added an extra layer to the unfolding mystery. The truth of who is really in peril here is concealed for so long that we never feel like anyone is in any palpable danger until the climax. Unable or unwilling to tell their story in a visual manner, Feig and Sonnenshine rely on crassly written voiceover from not one but two characters whenever they need to dole out a slab of information to the the viewer.
The Housemaid is a lot less campy than you might expect from Feig, who like Baz Luhrmann is a straight filmmaker determined to convince us that he's gay (good campy movies are generally made by gay men trying to pass as straight). Only Seyfried knows that this sort of thing works best when pitched to 11, and her crazy eyes are working overtime here. The usually reliable Sweeney is disappointingly flat (not a criticism usually levelled in her direction, if you know what I mean). She plays Millie as a mousy shrew until the script eventually calls for her to do something different, but even then she seems unsure of what tone to strike. As with the Simple Favor movies, Feig makes the mistake of separating his female leads for too much of the narrative, and Seyfried and Sweeney never get the chance to indulge in the sort of scenery chewing competition teased by the premise.
Things get more interesting in a final act that takes a surprisingly dark and bloody turn into '70s exploitation territory. But by that point you'll have lost so much interest in these characters that the climax loses much of its impact. An epilogue teases a potential sequel, and in the right hands this could be a fun franchise. But those hands simply don't belong to Feig.
The Housemaid is in UK/ROI cinemas from December 22nd.
