The Housemaid review: Uneven thriller stumbles despite strong performances

The Housemaid, Paul Feig's new thriller adaptation of Freida McFadden's 2022 novel, opens in theaters with Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried delivering performances that are stylish but not enough to anchor a twist-filled story critics describe as uneven and campy.

The film follows Millie Calloway (Sweeney), a parolee who lands an interview for a live-in housemaid position with Nina Winchester (Seyfried), a glamorous mother who runs a pristine, luxurious home. Millie arrives with a fabricated resumé and a car full of secrets, presenting herself as overqualified while actually living out of her vehicle and in need of shelter. Nina, meanwhile, presents herself as a buzzing, put-together parent who keeps order in a house that looks nothing like the chaos Millie encounters on her first day. The job seems to be the perfect foothold for both, but the early setup quickly reveals a far more unstable dynamic. Nina allocates Millie a combative first day in which the house is a mess, and her personal life is anything but orderly, including a tense exchange about a key to a small attic room that Millie is given but finds lacking in light and air. <br/>

The tension deepens as Andrew Winchester (Brandon Sklenar), Nina's dreamy husband, appears as a foil to Nina's erratic behavior. He is the audience’s window into a marriage that looks glossy from a distance but harbors its own set of anxieties. Millie’s growing exposure to this domestic world — the attic room with a window that barely opens and a door that locks from the outside — amplifies the sense that something dangerous lurks behind the veneer of wealth. The narrative unfolds with an onion-like layering of secrets, punctuated by a series of plot twists that Feig attempts to subvert expectations through narration-driven turns rather than purely visual suspense. Yet the cadence often feels more constructed than earned, producing anxious chuckles rather than sustained dread.

The Houses of this domestic thriller become a character in their own right, and Feig leans into glossy surfaces and sharp dialogue as a way to signal danger. Millie’s ability to manipulate those around her — and Nina’s facility for throwing tantrums that reveal deeper bruises — creates a pornographic pull toward the film’s more ridiculous moments. Instead of a tightly wound tension machine, The Housemaid often reads as a campy Lifetime soap dressed in high-gloss production design. The result is a film that aims for the mood of a cunning psychological puzzle but lands closer to a misaligned parody, where the tone keeps shifting between thriller, comedy, and melodrama without ever finding a stable footing.

Sweeney and Sklenar are clearly aiming to be electric on screen, and they land a few electric moments in the third act, when the character dynamics finally tilt toward revelation. Seyfried commits fully to Nina, shifting from poised host to volatile figure with a ferocious commitment that highlights the film’s core contradictions. Yet even their strongest work does not fully overcome the underlying misalignment between the film’s ambitions and its execution. Feig, known for comedies like Bridesmaids, trades some of his lightness for a thriller itch here, attempting to evoke the taut, twisty energy of A Simple Favor but failing to conjure the same earned wit or suspense. The Housemaid, adapted from McFadden's 2022 novel, comes off more as a campy Lifetime soap that earns laughs for the wrong reasons rather than for clever storytelling.

The result is a film that some viewers may enjoy for its glossy surfaces and melodramatic turns, but critics widely view as a misfire in Feig’s foray into darker material. The narrative’s reliance on escalation and dialogue-driven reveals often feels like a convenient shortcut rather than a carefully engineered plot engine. The pacing slows in stretches where the narration dominates, and by the final act, the film’s twists have become increasingly hard to justify, even as Sweeney and Seyfried push to salvage the material with their performances.

From a technical standpoint, The Housemaid registers as a polished production: sleek visuals, precise editing, and a soundtrack that underlines the film’s obsession with appearances. However, those strengths do not compensate for a story that often seems to hunt for shocks rather than develop meaningful character arcs. The final prognosis from many critics is that the film is a disappointment relative to its premise and to Feig’s past work exploring crime thrillers with a comic edge. The Housemaid is rated R for strong/bloody violent content, sexual assault, sexual content, nudity, and language, and runs 2 hours and 11 minutes. It is in theaters now.

The Housemaid sits at an odd crossroads in contemporary cinema: a glossy, star-driven thriller that talks a big game about deception and domestic life, yet rarely delivers a crisp, cumulative payoff. For fans of the cast, the film offers a showcase of Sweeney and Seyfried at their most fearless and committed; for others, it may feel like an overlong, muddled detour from Feig’s sharper, more enjoyable provocations. The critical reception highlights a lingering question about how far a high-concept premise can travel before it trips over its own contrivances.

In the end, the verdict from the reviewers is stark: The Housemaid may attract an audience drawn to its stylized surface and provocative premise, but its inconsistencies and reliance on misdirection over coherent storytelling render it a less satisfying thrill ride than its ambitions promise. It is a film that invites audiences to linger on the surfaces of deception while offering too little to reward sustained attention, making it a rare misstep for a director known for sharper, more precise thrillers. The Housemaid earns a cautious note for its performances and production values, but the overall experience remains a mixed bag that may not satisfy viewers seeking a tightly wound, twist-filled ride.

As studios continue to explore the lucrative space where domestic life becomes a battleground for power, The Housemaid stands as a reminder that a strong cast and glossy presentation cannot entirely compensate for a plot that fails to cohere. The conversation around the film will likely focus on the performances that do land, the moments of wit that land too, and the ways in which the material could have been sharpened to fully realize its disturbing premise.