The Housemaid (2025) [Movie Review] — A Stylishly Wicked Suburban Game of Cat and Mouse

Paul Feig’s The Housemaid, adapted from Freida McFadden’s novel and written for the screen by Rebecca Sonnenshine and McFadden, is a glossy, pulpy thriller that revels in high-end interiors and low-down motives. The film pitches a desperate young woman against a picture-perfect Long Island household and teases erotic rivalry, class envy, and simmering menace. It’s entertaining and intermittently thrilling — even if it often keeps the fun at arm’s length.

Plot & Screenplay

An outsider slips into a marriage, and the lines quickly blur

Millie (Sydney Sweeney) arrives at Nina Winchester’s pristine home as a live-in housemaid at a moment when stability could mean freedom: she’s on probation and needs steady work. Nina (Amanda Seyfried) is the manicured ideal of suburban grace, while husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) is the magnetic center of the household. Sonnenshine’s script leans into psychological gamesmanship — passive aggression, whispered rivalries, and carefully staged emotional set pieces — and layers the story with class politics and power dynamics. The plot delivers some genuine jolts, although several twists are telegraphed too plainly, undercutting surprise with a sense of inevitability.

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Performances

Seyfried steals scenes; Sweeney finds her moment late

Amanda Seyfried chews the scenery with delicious abandon, playing Nina as a volatile, performative force whose smiles can feel like knives. Her performance is the film’s combustible heartbeat — unpredictable, theatrical, and often magnetic. Sydney Sweeney is more restrained for much of the film, her Millie shaped by survival instincts rather than sparkle; when the script finally allows her to unspool in the third act, she proves she can match the movie’s darker impulses. Brandon Sklenar’s Andrew is attractively ambiguous — charming until he isn’t — but his role lacks the dimensionality to fully register as the film’s romantic or moral pivot. The supporting cast supplies tidy scaffolding around the central triangle without stealing focus.

Direction & Tone

Polished craft, inconsistent appetite for camp

Feig directs with a glossy eye for suburban tableau: immaculate set design, sharp costumes, and cinematography that highlights the uncanny sterility of wealth. He stages the unsettling moments well, creating palpable claustrophobia in expansive interiors. Yet the film wavers on how seriously to take itself — sometimes hinting at campy satire (a welcome echo of Feig’s lighter work) and at other times insisting on grim melodrama. That tonal ambivalence means some scenes land as thrilling while others feel muted or oddly earnest.

Themes & Subtext

Class, power, and the theater of perfection

Beneath the thriller mechanics, The Housemaid interrogates how wealth polishes over insecurity and how domestic roles can mask deeper dysfunction. The film pays attention to class friction — Millie’s vulnerability versus Nina’s curated security — and uses that divide to fuel jealousy, manipulation, and performative femininity. It nods to Gothic predecessors (the household as a character) and borrows from the psychological-romantic tradition while staying firmly modern in its treatment of desire and entitlement.

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Verdict

A stylish, uneven potboiler — worth a watch

The Housemaid doesn’t always commit to the wicked fun it promises, but it offers enough slick set pieces, strong central performances, and moral ambiguity to be worth the ticket. Seyfried is a delightful force of nature here; Sweeney grows into the part when the script loosens its reins. If you go in hoping for full-on camp, the film may feel restrained. If you appreciate a well-mounted psychological thriller with bite and some glossy silliness, Paul Feig’s latest is a pleasurable — if imperfect — outing.

Rating: ★★★⯪☆ (3.5/5)