January 22, 2026

In Paul Feig’s latest film, The Housemaid, we’re asked to believe a sane housewife looked at Sydney Sweeney, with all her Botticellian beauty and statuesque allure (and great jeans, of course), and decided the best thing for her marriage was to move her into the guest room. This is the premise on which The Housemaid is built.

It’s appreciable to see capable filmmakers venture into new territory. Feig made his name with coming-of-age comedy classics such as Freaks and Geeks (1999) before pivoting to some of the sharpest female-led action-comedies of the 2010s in The Heat (2013) and Spy (2015). His latest foray culls inspiration from ’90s domestic thrillers, pitting modern star Sweeney against the immeasurably talented Amanda Seyfried.

The ostensible rivals first meet in the opening scene, where Sweeney, as Millie Calloway, arrives at Nina Winchester’s (Seyfried) home for a live-in housemaid interview. “You’re sure you even need a housekeeper?” she asks as Nina gives her a tour of the house, which appears speckled and spotless, as if staged for a real estate listing.

Among Feig’s triumphs is how patiently he seeds unease into this immaculate domestic tableau. Nina reverently describes her husband, Andrew (Brandon Sklenar), as the brilliant architect behind their home, despite his complete lack of architectural training. She praises his love of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, painting him as some high-brow intellectual, masking a sensibility much closer to James Wan’s Saw (2004).

Millie, for her part, arrives with secrets of her own. Despite the clear chemistry between her and the Winchesters, her narration — unfortunately undercut by Sweeney’s grating vocal fry, which feels out of step with both her character and the film’s tone — reveals a résumé riddled with fabrications. She is homeless and on parole, terrified that a background check will expose her criminal record. A montage of her showering in gas station bathrooms, sleeping in her car, and eating at seedy fast-food joints where she even solicits the fryer for an application makes it abundantly clear that she’s scrambling for survival and desperately needs the job.

But when Millie is hired (much to her surprise), the Winchesters’ sheen begins to fracture almost immediately, starting with Andrew, who seems genuinely blindsided by the news of a live-in housemaid. By the following morning, Nina’s charming mask slips entirely as she bellows accusations over some missing papers. “You need to be more careful next time. You ruined my entire day,” she venomously whispers to Millie, before retreating into the performative comfort of her husband’s arms. As The Smiths’ Morrissey might remark in such circumstances, “I was looking for a job and then I found a job / And heaven knows I’m miserable now.”

Nina is a high-strung, high-maintenance, and high-functioning sociopath. She hurls demands at Millie, then proceeds to pretend she said no such thing. Seyfried’s stirring performance convincingly blurs the lines between deliberate gaslighting and genuine delusion.

The film’s tension is largely sustained and propelled by Seyfried’s terrifying performance. Andrew, meanwhile, is presented as an almost altruistic alien: strikingly handsome, extraordinarily affluent, and possessed of the patience of a saint, or at least the temperament of a monk. Yet Feig understands that the most effective domestic thrillers are those in which saints and sinners are never quite who they appear to be, and the film’s third act delivers a well-executed twist (the less said, the better).

If The Housemaid wobbles, it does so mostly in the balance of its performances. Sweeney plays Millie capably, but she is upstaged at virtually every exchange with Seyfried, whose emotional commitment and portrayal of psychosis are simply too forceful to be treated as equal sparring partners. Sweeney, as an actress, is at her best when she’s let loose and allowed to seize control of a scene — on HBO’s Euphoria, for example, her strongest moments come when her character is at her lowest, cornered and frantic, lashing out with raw conviction. The Housemaid offers her one such opportunity in the third act, when Millie is pushed to her breaking point and finally fights back to regain the upper hand. For a brief stretch, Sweeney dominates, exuding the same feral energy that made her stand out on Euphoria. But for much of the film, in the demure register Millie is forced to occupy, her presence is inevitably diminished beside Seyfried.

Meanwhile, Michele Morrone, cast as the Winchester groundskeeper Enzo, is given even less to do beyond looming as an ominous, brooding Italian hunk who delivers hints of warning with deadpan stares, as if trying to caution Millie that she’s wandering into Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010).

Still, these are minor concerns. The Housemaid is a fresh take on the domestic-femme-fatale thriller, a subgenre once a reliable mainstay of 1990s Hollywood. It embraces its clichés (What did you expect would happen when you put Sydney Sweeney and Brandon Sklenar under the same roof?), but also has the good sense to subvert the genre’s most tired assumption: that in such stories, it is always the woman who is “crazy.” The result is a film with enough twists and sustained tension to keep you hooked through its runtime.

Originally published on The Washington Examiner