Review of The Housemaid, directed by Paul Feig

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently started an 8-5 job and have been trying to reclaim my sanity and hobbies by finding fun things to do on the weekends and after work, and one of my saving graces truly has been my AMC A List subscription. I’ve always had one on and off throughout graduate school, and I recently reclaimed my subscription after a brief stint of thinking I was going to move to India (long story).

Sometimes the movies I really want to see aren’t included on AMC A List, which is sad, but I accept the reality of the situation. I get a ton of use out of this subscription. On a slightly different note though, I used to work professionally as a film critic, which is very much a dying career, and when I would go to the film festivals I watched everything that really excited me.

Nowadays I just post on this blog, and my A List has been a way to keep a foot in the door with this world. When you work a full-time job I think it’s so easy to fall into a rut where life becomes your work, and I don’t want my job to become my life. So when something like The Housemaid comes into theaters and it interests me, I go and see it.

For context, I never read the book this was based on. I never really had an interest in it, and I honestly kind of assumed it was a take on the same story that the Korean versions of The Handmaid already tackled more than fifty years ago.

Let’s get into my review!

A wealthy Long Island housewife hires a new, troubled maid, but that untangles a deep, psychotic web within this seemingly perfect household.

We start this movie from the perspective of Millie, a young woman who finished up a 15-year sentence in prison early and is now in search for a new job. She needs a job due to the conditions of her parole, and she’s getting increasingly desperate for one. But when a housewife, Nina Winchester, brings her into her wealthy Long Island home, it marks a turning point for Millie.

Despite her resume being entirely forged and personality pretty much fake, Nina gives Millie a call back while she’s sleeping in her car. Millie is hired to take care of the home and Nina’s daughter, Cece, and is given an attic room inside of the house. She notices immediately that the window doesn’t open and that there’s a deadlock on the door, but doesn’t take too much note of it at first.

It’s when she cleans after the first day that she realizes Nina is actually deeply mentally ill, as she blames Millie for getting rid of the papers with her PTA speech and has a full on breakdown. This proves to be a consistent theme throughout Millie’s employment with Nina, as Nina will ask her to do things, such as pick Cece up or give her clothes, and then insist that she never did that.

It’s through the other PTA moms and another mom at dance that Millie learns Nina tried to drown her daughter and then took a bunch of sleeping pills, which shows everyone around her thinks she’s deeply unhinged. The straw that breaks the camel’s back is when Nina asks Millie to book a nice suite and Broadway show for her and her husband, and when she yells at Millie because she has to take Cece down to DC that weekend, Andrew, her husband Millie has been fantasizing about, offers to take Millie instead.

They go to the show, to Peter Luger steakhouse, and end the night in the same hotel room having sex after Millie gets a string of texts from Nina threatening and firing her. They go home early after Nina cuts her trip short, but she sets Millie up at the grocery store to be arrested under the guise that Millie stole her car (in reality, she told Millie to take it). She knows about the affair and isn’t happy, then Andrew kicks her out.

Millie and Andrew start their romantic tryst in the home, and he fires the creepy groundskeeper, who gave Millie warnings earlier, after Millie sees him in the door. She ruins Andrew’s grandmother’s china in the process, and he locks her in the attic room in retaliation. Then we cut to Nina’s point of view, as she overjoyed to be kicked out of the house. Turns out Andrew is a predator and picked her up when she was a vulnerable single mother, and whenever she did anything wrong, he locked her in the room and threatened her.

He also orchestrated the event where Cece almost drowned, and now he wants to do the same to Millie—except Millie’s punishment is he wants her to carve twenty one deep lines into her stomach. Nina set Millie up to replace her, but when she goes to see Cece in DC, Cece says that they should save Millie, too. Millie, as it turns out, was in prison for murdering a male classmate who sexually assaulted/raped her roommate, and Nina thinks she can handle herself.

Millie does carve the lines into her stomach, but ends up overpowering Andrew and locking him into the room. She grabs his grandmother’s china and breaks it from the other side of the door, making him upset, and when she threatens to light him on fire he agrees to her single demand: rip out his front tooth. He does it, as he’s afraid to die.

Nina comes back to the house, not knowing it’s Andrew up there. She opens the door thinking she’s rescuing Millie, but then an enraged Andrew comes out. While Millie escapes, he tries to sweet talk Nina into resuming their life together, and she refuses. Millie reappears and pushes him over the edge of his beloved spiral suitcase and he dies from the fall, and Nina grabs a light and throws it next to his body.

She tells Millie to run, then calls Enzo. When the police arrive, the female cop questioning her gives Nina a pass, as it turns out her sister was Andrew’s mysterious ex-fiancee. At Andrew’s funeral Millie comes back, Nina gives her a massive check and tells her to start a new life, then goes with Cece to start over in California.

The film ends with Millie going to another housemaid interview, having been recommended by Nina, and the woman implies she has a terrible husband, too. Millie agrees to take the job.

Overall Thoughts

The premise of this movie is really interesting, especially considering all of the plot twists, but I thought the pacing was really off. Controversies aside, I also don’t think Sydney Sweeney has been in any roles that convinces me she can act well. She always places a similar kind of character and seems kind of stiff, and with her being the main focus of the movie, besides Nina (Seyfried does the best job out of everyone here in my opinion), she simply doesn’t sell it for me.

I also kept thinking back to the Korean movies The Housemaid, which came out in 1960 and 2010 respectively. The 1960 version is considered a classic in Korean cinema, and it tells a very similar story—albeit with a more sexist angle, as the lower class housemaid coming into a middle class household is the sign of a devil, as she tempts the husband and becomes the reason for the house falling apart.

It was with that in mind I appreciate the feminist undertones of this movie (which I genuinely did not believe until I saw the plot twist—I think it was sexist to a point up until then), but I wanted more complexity and depth to it. It lacks substance for me in a way that I crave when it comes to movies.

I can see people out there liking this one though, so if you haven’t seen it, go watch it. Movies are meant to be seen, not read about on the Internet.

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