The Housemaid is trashy cat-nip for true crime obsessives

Directed by Paul Feig (Bridesmaids), The Housemaid is a pulpy tongue-in-cheek adaptation of a breezy thriller.

Freida McFadden’s best-selling book is one that you can easily read in a day, and that’s no shade to it – it is what it is, both absorbing and perfectly serviceable trash.

But putting it up on the big screen does emphasise the more fanciful elements and plot holes, leaving nowhere to hide, while the approach doesn’t see it measure up as an edge-of-your-seat experience.

The Housemaid movie has fun with itself throughout, though – just a few minutes in and there’s a foreshadowing so obvious that the film almost pauses to check if you caught that and provides a good (smug) laugh for anyone who has read the book.

Sydney Sweeney’s Millie Calloway is a troubled young woman, living in her car, but somehow manages to wrangle a job as a live-in nanny for wealthy couple Nina and Andrew Winchester (Amanda Seyfried and It Ends with Us’s Brandon Sklenar) – despite having a mysterious criminal record.

That would be the first red flag if Nina hadn’t already told virtual stranger Millie in the interview that she was pregnant, before asking her not to mention it to her husband. In fact, there follows a veritable parade of red flags.

Millie is shown to her spartan bedroom at the far-end of the attic where Nina enthusiastically tells her, ‘You can blast your music as loud as you want, we can’t hear you at all!’ – but there’s also a window she can’t open and no key for the door.

Everything has been almost too good to be true until now, with Nina pressing a new phone into her hand and sorting out a credit card while inviting her to eat dinner with them, but there are some very choppy waters ahead.

The performances are generally solid, leaning into the high-camp drama of it all, with Amanda Seyfried as the absolute stand-out. She perfects the brittle, paranoid and cruel housewife with a glossy surface smile and large side serving of unhinged and unpredictable. Her careful balancing of these qualities elevates the entire movie – and this combined with her mesmerising central performance in The Testament of Ann Lee makes 2025 the year the actress truly left any mention of Mean Girls in the dust.

Sweeney’s performance is fine, but her character is a cypher, so there’s not a huge amount given to her to show range until we get to the surprisingly bloody and violent events of later. She’s the unreliable narrator (or certainly one with secrets), so there’s not much for her to go on and Sweeney seems content for that to be the case.

Her looks, though, become a central part of her performance after Nina testily spots she’s removed her glasses following the interview, thus – as popular culture insists – making her instantly attractive. She’s also reprimanded for walking downstairs in the middle of the night in skimpy pyjamas.

Both these things occur in the book as well, but it’s really stretched to breaking point that once Sweeney’s assets are on display, there they remain, thrust skywards in multiple outfits. The cleavage is so egregious that they all must be in on the joke of playing into the cliché of the tempting nanny.

Sklenar is perfectly decent as the husband at the heart of this, there mainly to react and look pretty – although his chemistry is slightly lacking with Sweeney for two such objectively hot stars.

Aside from casting Sklenar, The Housemaid also makes it clear it’s one for the gals with its peppy female-led pop rock soundtrack including Kelly Clarkson’s Since U Been Gone and Taylor Swift’s I Did Something Bad (subtlety is not its strong suit).

It’s also the female market that are most obsessed with true crime, the more twisted and shocking the better, so those gals will be lapping up the film’s denouement.

By that time, the tension has been built up well enough to some pretty wince-inducing scenes. Without spoilers, I’ll put it this way – you’ll be shuddering at the word ‘privilege’.

The Housemaid is un UK cinemas from December 26.

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