The Housemaid: an enjoyably ‘pulpy’ concoction

Sydney Sweeney in The Housemaid — Sydney Sweeney as Millie

(Image credit: Daniel McFadden / Lionsgate)

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”.