The Housemaid

Grade: B-

The Housemaid is a jigsaw puzzle that includes extra pieces you don’t need. Not everything gets a payoff or a callback, and on the other hand, there are instances of blatantly unsubtle foreshadowing. (“These stairs are treacherous. I swear they’re gonna be the death of someone one day.”) My favorite example of the former is the biggest unintended laugh, in a movie that has several. The title character – a live-in maid/babysitter – is playing with the young daughter, and sees something in the dollhouse that belongs to her: one of those troll action figures with big, wild hair. She questions the girl. “Cece, did you go into my room? This troll is very important to me. Please don’t take my stuff.” I thought for sure this was building to something that would come up later. Why set it up, and not do anything with it? But no, they introduce it, only to let it hang there.

The woman is Millie, played by Sydney Sweeney. She is living in her car, after having recently been a resident of prison. She served 10 out of a 15-year sentence, and has gotten out on parole. If she can stay out of trouble and hold down a steady job/home, she won’t have to go back and do the rest of her time. What seems to be a perfect occupation has fallen into her lap, despite being deceptive on her resume. She accepts the position of a live-in housemaid for an extremely wealthy family of three. Their gated monstrosity of a house looks like a dream. If I had a basement man cave like the one here, nobody would ever see me again. Millie’s modest room, way up in the house, used to be attic storage space. She’s told that this is the best situation for her. “You’ll have so much privacy up here. You can blast your music, yell, scream, what have you, and not a soul can hear you from downstairs.” That wouldn’t be more foreshadowing, would it?

Nina (Amanda Seyfried), the wife/mother, is a piece of work. She stages incident after incident that ends in Millie looking foolish. Nina accuses Millie of misplacing or throwing away her notes for a PTA speech she’s supposed to make. Millie never touched those notes, or even saw them. Nina calls upon Millie to pick Cece up from ballet class at the last minute and bring her home – only to arrive and find out that Cece was going to have a sleepover at a friend’s house, and so the transportation situation was already arranged. After asking Millie to use Nina’s car for errands from now on (instead of her own), Nina calls the police to report it stolen while Millie is out getting groceries. Nina vacillates between these maddeningly devious setups to acting like Millie’s best gal pal. Her husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar from Drop) always senses what’s really going on, and is eternally apologetic towards Millie.

I think every thriller cliche in the book is represented here. A character opens a bathroom mirror that doubles as a medicine/toiletry cabinet, closes it after a few seconds, and BOOM! Someone is standing there. Knives make the sound of metal swishing against metal, just by being held. The climax has a “it’s just been revoked” moment, where somebody comes out of nowhere to finish the job, after delivering a one-liner pertinent to the dialogue that just happened. It is ridiculous and twisty, but always involving and engaging enough. You can say many things about how hackneyed The Housemaid is, but it will not blend together with the other 100+ films I see a year. I’m going to remember it. The one time I looked at my watch was to discover there was still an hour left, and I was happy about that. “Oh, cool. I can’t wait to see what else happens. How far will they take this?” – I thought.

In that final hour, we learn information that changes our view on what we saw before. I don’t know that it’s air-tight. Sometimes it seems to make fuzzy, or outright negate, some actions from earlier. A character I really liked turns out to have an unsavory streak. Even though it defies logic, not to mention police ethics, I appreciate how the ending plays out. There is a statement being made here. If you already have, or would rather not sit and watch Avatars swim around for 3 hours and 17 minutes, The Housemaid is an eventful, audacious, adequately entertaining 2 hours and 11 minutes. I enjoyed it a little bit, but it’s not as meaningful as that troll.

Grade: B-