The Housemaid: an enjoyably ‘pulpy’ concoction

Sydney Sweeney seems to have more vehicles than Hertz these days, said Jonathan Romney in the Financial Times. This latest, helmed by “Bridesmaids” director Paul Feig, is adapted from a novel by Freida McFadden – and it’s as formulaic as they come.

Sweeney plays Millie, a young woman who gets a job working as a live-in housekeeper in a Long Island mansion belonging to “laid-back tech bro” Andrew Winchester (Brandon Sklenar) and his wife, Nina (Amanda Seyfried). But obviously “nothing is what it seems”: Millie is hiding a chequered past, while the Winchesters themselves are far from kosher. Andrew is suspiciously charming. Nina is increasingly unhinged, and has an “uncanny knack of materialising unexpectedly whenever Millie shuts a mirrored medicine cabinet”. The scene is thus set for simmering sexual tension and ludicrous generic thrills.

“The Housemaid” is a “full-tilt throwback” to the erotic thrillers of the 1990s, said Tim Robey in The Telegraph. And “if plausibility doesn’t bother you”, it “is kind of a scream”. The logic of the plot is “paper-thin”, agreed Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. But it’s not uninteresting in the way that it deals with women’s mental health, and the “hypocrisy” around it: Nina is clearly unstable, yet her friends don’t hesitate to discuss her trauma as if it were “an amuse-bouche bit of gossip”. And it’s Seyfried who makes the film, shifting “imperceptibly between mean girl, bunny boiler, and sympathetic sufferer”.

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“The Housemaid” seems to be straining after a Hitchcockian atmosphere, which it certainly doesn’t achieve – but it is an enjoyably “pulpy” concoction.