Breaking Down the Satisfying Ending of The Housemaid

The Housemaid ends with a Gone Girl–style reversal that redefines the suspense that preceded it. In Paul Feig’s adaptation, the audience follows Millie Calloway as she enters the Winchesters’ upstate New York mansion—a fraught, parole-bound life that seems to offer a path to safety. The final act reveals a longer game of control and coercion, a twist that reframes who is pursuing whom and what counts as freedom in a domestic noir built on appearances.

Millie’s arrival unsettles the Winchesters. She is a felon with a hidden past who discover that Nina Winchester’s pristine life is built on keeping Andrew Winchester’s volatility in check. Nina’s strategy, as the film lays it out, is to use Millie as a wedge to separate Andrew and Nina enough to let Cece—the couple’s daughter and the linchpin of their tenuous arrangement—escape a looming custody dispute. A night out with Andrew culminates in a risky tryst, and Nina uses location tracking to confront them, escalating the manipulation. Viewers are guided to believe Millie may have found a clean exit—an escape from danger or, at least, a way to disappear with Cece, into a new life.

The twist lands when Nina finally shares her side of the story and the reason Andrew’s abuse persisted. She describes years of confinement in the attic, punishments for minor failings, and the deliberate cultivation of a dangerous dynamic that kept Cece in the family orbit. The film reframes the power struggle as a calculated survival plot in which Nina and Millie align against a man who weaponizes charm to mask cruelty. A high-tension sequence follows a night when Millie and Andrew’s tryst exposes the deepest fault line of the marriage. The audience is reminded that the seemingly perfect household can harbor a very real danger—and that the supposed victim may be the person most capable of taking control when pushed to the edge.

Millie’s decisive turn arrives in a brutal, intimate moment of self-definition. After enduring a long night of coercive control, she finally pushes back. In a sequence that mirrors the book’s grim intensity but with its own cinematic torque, Millie stabs Andrew with a kitchen cheese knife, seizes his phone and the weapon, and locks him in the attic. Nina returns with a plan that preserves both of them in the short term: frame Andrew’s death as an accident, keep Cece in the loop, and send Millie toward a new life as a housemaid with plausible deniability. The ending is deliberately ambiguous about justice and truth, offering a resolute, albeit morally fraught, resolution that foregrounds survival and alliance over conventional vindication.

In the immediate aftermath, Nina offers Millie a significant sum and a fresh job lead, signaling a new beginning that binds their fates together. Cece’s stubborn insistence on helping Millie reinforces the sense that the two women have formed a covert alliance against a dangerous husband, even as their own pasts and present predicaments complicate any easy escape. The film’s finale therefore delivers not a simple victory for Millie, but a reframed victory built on shared risk and an emphasis on staying one step ahead of danger.

The Housemaid’s ending diverges in notable ways from Freida McFadden’s original novel. In the book, Nina’s time in a psychiatric facility shapes her perception of events and Millie’s backstory unfolds with different consequences. The film instead has Nina lie about her past to ensure a return home, while casting Millie as a canny survivor who can be used as a strategic tool in a larger plan. Where the novel’s ending often leans into a detective’s awareness that is acknowledged but not acted upon, the film grants the two women a more explicit, action-driven amassing of power that ends with a shared, if uneasy, pathway forward.

Director Paul Feig has discussed the twist as a deliberate gambit to court surprise. He told Den of Geek that the project was designed to let audiences root for “everything they should not be rooting for,” and then reveal the real story that follows. “There’s things that work in the book that are really satisfying, but on the big screen you always want more,” Feig said, hinting at the possibility of further installments if audiences respond to Millie’s next moves. Time has noted the ending’s satisfying, provocative appeal while acknowledging the film’s deliberate departure from the source material.

Time summarized the breakdown of the finale as a clever recalibration of audience expectations: a domestic setting that looks flawless on the surface becomes the site of calculated manipulation, violence, and self-preservation. The adaptation, scripted by Rebecca Sonnenshine and anchored by Seyfried’s Nina and Sweeney’s Millie, preserves the thriller’s glossy veneer while sharpening the teeth of the central conflict. The ending’s defiant choose-your-own-adventure energy invites speculation about what comes next for Millie and Nina, and whether Feig would revisit their story in future installments if the response warrants.

There remains a final note of cinematic possibility. Feig’s remarks about the future, coupled with the material’s brisk, high-camp energy, have sparked conversations about whether the other two novels in the Housemaid trilogy could be adapted. The door is open, the interest is there, and the film’s provocative ending has given audiences a clear incentive to imagine where Millie’s next chapter might take her—or what new power dynamics could emerge should the story move to new settings or new antagonists. The final image lingers on the uneasy alliance between Nina and Millie, a partnership born of necessity and sharpened by danger, as the credits hint at a world where appearances continue to deceive and survival remains a shared, fragile goal.