The Housemaid ends with a Gone Girl–style twist that rewrites its own story

Paul Feig’s adaptation of Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid builds to a Gone Girl–style reversal that redefines nearly everything that unfolds before it. In a high-camp, whip-smart thriller set in an upstate New York mansion, Millie Calloway—played by Sydney Sweeney—enters the Winchesters’ world under the guise of a fresh start, but what begins as a precarious bond quickly spirals into a dangerous game of control, manipulation, and murder. The film, based on McFadden’s best-seller, stars Amanda Seyfried as Nina Winchester, Brandon Sklenar as Andrew Winchester, and Indiana Elle as Cece, with Millie’s parole status driving the stakes in a plot that plays with readers and viewers as it unfolds. Time magazine’s breakdown of the ending notes the twist’s abrupt reframe of the preceding hour-plus, a reversal Feig deliberately designed to surprise and then compel a second look at every exchanged word and deed.

From the opening, The Housemaid presents a glossy, meticulously curated home life that masks a dark undercurrent. Nina and Andrew live with their young daughter, Cece, in a stately mansion, while Millie, a convicted felon trying to reintegrate after a decade in prison, takes a live-in job that would appear to offer stability. The attic room where Millie lodges is notably isolated, its door locking from the outside—a visual cue that the house is not simply a backdrop but a character in its own right. Nina’s behavior grows increasingly unstable and controlling, a contrast to Andrew’s old-fashioned charm and apparent tenderness toward Millie and Cece. The couple’s history runs deeper than an ordinary marital turbulence, and the film signals that Nina’s past includes a stint in a psychiatric facility after a traumatic incident involving Cece. A web of secrets tightens around the trio as Millie becomes entangled in a complicated dynamic that blends fear, desire, and the threat of detection.

A pivotal plot turn arrives when Millie and Andrew share a late-night moment that seems to open a path to real connection. Yet Millie’s burgeoning closeness to Andrew collides with Nina’s increasingly manipulative schemes—she tracks Millie’s movements via a phone Nina gave her and leverages the vulnerability of a young woman trying to rebuild her life. The film makes clear that Nina’s motive for bringing Millie into the house isn’t simply to seek help but to place a confidant in a position that could be used against Andrew and any leverage he might hold over Nina. As Millie navigates this precarious situation, the film emphasizes how quickly affection can become weaponized in a home built on control and fear. A mid-episode scene anchors the tension: Andrew company-buys Millie a sense of safety, only to pivot back to coercion, and Nina’s past—described in flashbacks and conversations—frames her as both victim and strategist in the couple’s fraught dynamic.

When the seemingly transformative moment arrives—Millie and Andrew briefly sharing a night out in the city and then sleeping together in a hotel while Nina is away—the narrative shifts into a more dangerous mode. The couple’s tryst becomes fuel for Nina’s calculated strategy: ignite jealousy, then reassert control by turning Millie into the kind of figure Andrew cannot safely resist but also cannot fully accept. The screening room’s feedback is explicit in the dialogue and staging: the audience is invited to root for choices that later prove morally compromised, a deliberate misdirection Feig has discussed in interviews with Den of Geek about the project’s big switch-up. In the Hollywood Reporter interview, Feig explained that the film could lean on a satisfying button for the characters’ arcs, a device he used to set up the final reversal without spoilers before revealing the true story.

The film’s central twist redefines which actions are “safe” and which are predicated on fear, desire, and coercive control. The pregnancy of power shifts when Nina reveals a plan to force Andrew out of Millie’s life by making him unappealing to Millie’s sense of self-preservation and independence. As the plot accelerates toward its climax, Andrew’s control fractures: his coercive tactics—locking Nina in the attic during their marriage and imposing brutal punishments on her for minor missteps—are exposed in a way that reframes the couple’s entire history. Millie’s own backstory—the teen-era crime for which she was imprisoned after an alleged sexual assault—becomes a crucial lever that Nina uses to shape Millie’s perceived loyalties. The interplay of truth and deception culminates in a sequence that unfolds with a brutal literalness: Millie carves 21 lines into her stomach using a plate shard, a ritual of atonement forced by Andrew’s control, and places the recovered shard beneath the attic door as a coercive message.

In a decisive turn, Nina’s own account of what happened becomes a tool for a larger deception. She lies about her own past in order to secure a way back home, believing that aligning with Millie’s apparent vulnerability is the surest path to freedom. Yet the twist reveals that Nina’s plan is designed not to restore a conventional family, but to nudge Millie into taking a role that would empower her to escape an abusive marriage of her own—an outcome that would shield Nina while leaving Millie with a path forward, at least temporarily. The narrative then pivots to the aftermath: Cece’s insistence that they return to help Millie, the funeral, and Nina’s decision to provide Millie with a substantial check and a future lead in another housemaid’s position. The film’s final image—an older, bruised Millie accepted into a new household—suggests that the cycle of abuse may persist, even as the two women have claimed a small moment of victory.

From a storytelling perspective, the ending diverges from the book’s conclusion in meaningful ways. In McFadden’s source material, the resolutions are more divergent, and the on-screen adaptation makes a conscious choice to foreground the sexualized power dynamics and the question of who benefits from the aftermath. The film’s finale—where Nina’s reprieve is contingent on keeping Millie close enough to serve as a potential instrument of escape for someone else—was a deliberate decision for Feig, who told Den of Geek that he wanted to give audiences a moment where they believe they’ve witnessed the end of the story, before showing that there was always more beneath the surface. He also noted to the Hollywood Reporter that he aimed for a “final button” on certain relationships, a choice that provides a sense of closure while leaving room for future installments. The Times’ analysis of the ending emphasizes the twist’s function as a reframe: it recasts the earlier scenes as part of a larger game rather than a linear descent into melodrama.

The Housemaid’s climactic sequence reorients the film’s moral compass and leaves open the possibility of further exploration of Millie’s arc and Nina’s fate. Feig has suggested he would be open to adapting the other two books in the Housemaid trilogy if there is audience interest, signaling that the project could continue to lean into its provocative, high-spirited yet morally thorny premise. For viewers, the final moments offer a double-edged takeaway: a sense of victory tempered by the knowledge that the menacing dynamic at the heart of the Winchesters’ home might endure in another form, and that the two women at the center of the story have, in a sense, rewritten their own futures by choosing survival and resilience over conventional outcomes.

The film’s reception thus hinges on its dual achievement: delivering a star-powered, glossy thriller with a taste for excess, and executing a twist that reframes what the audience has witnessed. It asks viewers to reevaluate loyalty, complicity, and power within intimate spaces, while also indulging in the very pleasures of a moodily stylish, twist-driven blockbuster. For fans of Freida McFadden’s original novel, and for cinephiles attracted to audacious, cathartic finales, The Housemaid offers a flavorful, if provocative, closer that begs to be revisited—ideally with an eye toward what Millie and Nina might do next, should the chance to continue their story arise.