Don’t Worry I’ll Make You Worry

My thoughts on The Housemaid

Have you ever watched a Nancy Meyers film and wondered what it might be like if all of the immaculately appointed living rooms, bedrooms and kitchens favored by her characters were suddenly splattered with blood as those very same characters all suddenly snapped and turned on each other with murderous rage? If you have—and I suspect there are plenty of you out there—then you are probably going to get a kick out of The Housemaid, the cheerfully and knowingly overwrought adaptation of Freida McFadden’s best-seller of the same name. With its over-the-top performances and insanely lurid plot developments, to call the film twisted trash would be a massive understatement. On the other hand, to call it that would not necessarily be a criticism because that is exactly the kind of thing that director Paul Feig is trying to do here and while it is far from perfect, it nevertheless makes for a fairly entertaining ride, thanks in no small part to its no-holds-barred attitude and the ways in which co-stars Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried throw themselves into their roles with heedless abandon.

As this is one of those films where you are better off knowing as little as possible going in, I will strive to be as circumspect as possible when describing it. As it begins, Millie Calloway (Sweeney) is arriving at the lavish suburban mansion to interview with the woman of the house, Nina Winchester (Seyfried), for a job as a live-in housemaid to her and her family, dreamboat husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) and young daughter Cece (Indiana Elle). The interview goes well enough and Nina is as kind as can be but as she leaves, Millie figures that she won’t get the job. It seems that, in addition to really needing the job, she also has a number of dark secrets in her past and has therefore filled her resume with a number of half-truths and outright lies in a desperate attempt to look good, though after meeting Nina, she figures that she is the kind of person who would catch on immediately that something is a little hinky about the whole thing.

Therefore, Millie is more than a little surprised when Nina calls to offer her the job. She is even more surprised on her first full day of work when the formerly pleasant and placid Nina has a full-on meltdown over some missing presentation notes that she instantly accuses Millie of tossing out with the trash. Over the next few days, Nina veers between rare moments of calm kindness with many more in which flies into a rage at the slightest provocation, usually blaming Millie for whatever is going wrong, even if she has not actually done anything. Doing his best to try to smooth things over is Andrew, who is deemed a near-saint within their upscale neighborhood for being so caring and supportive with Nina, especially in the face of a couple of near-psychotic breaks. Andrew tries to shield Millie from Nina’s increasingly unhinged behavior until the time arrives when Nina and Cece are away from the house for a weekend and Andrew and Millie eventually give in to their growing affection for each other.

At this point, I am going to say no more about what happens next. Some of you out there may think that you have a fairly good grasp on what will happen next but, suffice it to say, I will merely state that unless you have read the source novel ahead of time. Initially, we are led to believe that this will be another story along the lines of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle or Single White Female in which a mysterious-but-sexy stranger worms their way into the life of a happily married couple and threatens their seemingly perfect existence. Before long, though, the screenplay by Rebecca Sonnenshine pulls the first of numerous rugs out from under the feet of viewers to the point where each of the three main characters can be seen as either the real hero or villain at any given point. The story is, to put it mildly, preposterous right from the start and only becomes more so as it goes on, and so it was clearly a wise idea to put the direction in the hands of Paul Feig, who dealt with similar thematic material in the wildly entertaining A Simple Favor and the more repetitive Another Simple Favor. While the end result is not quite as snappy or deliriously entertaining as A Simple Favor—Feig sometimes struggles with the tonal shifts from creepy to campy and at 131 minutes, it could stand with a little tightening her and there—but he manages to keep things moving along at a resonantly brisk pace while keeping his metaphorical plates spinning until the time comes for him to let them shatter.

Although The Housemaid has an adept supporting cast that also includes Michele Morrone as the mysterious and brooding groundskeeper who always appears to be staring balefully at the proceedings going on around him and Elizabeth Perkins as Andrew’s mother, who seems to have stepped directly out of a Hitchcock film, the real juice is supplied by the two leads. In the more overtly showy role, Seyfried is clearly having a blast chomping the scenery in a manner that she handles with more control and finesse than one might immediately be assumed—while I suspect that she may have taken the role as a lark in the wake of her grueling and impressive work in the current The Testament of Ann Lee, she is just as committed and focused here as in that ostensibly more serious-minded work. As for Sweeney, the number of controversies and somewhat dubious projects that she has taken on over the last couple of years may have caused some to forget that as an actress, she is much more than just a pretty face. Her work here should serve as a reminder as she rides the wild script and character turns with as much grace and aplomb as Seyfried in a turn that is always riveting to watch, even if we don’t always know exactly what she is going to be doing next.

Make no mistake—The Housemaid is, to put it mildly, trash—the sort of film made for those who have been yearning for a return of the alternately lurid and loopy erotic thrillers that left viewers lingering in their seats long after they ended back in the day, partly due to trying to puzzle out all the twists and turns and partly to think about enough baseball teams to allow certain viewers to stand up without potentially causing a scene. If I wanted to, I could rail at length about the implausibility of the premise, the occasionally discomfiting ways in which it attempts to fuse together satirical observations about the denizens of chi-chi suburbs with grisly depictions of the horrors that can lurk beyond those well-manicured lawns. I could even point out that the only legitimately frightening moment comes when Seyfried’s character talks about getting a fresh start and hears the deathless line “At your age?” I am not going to, however, because while this film may not by aiming particularly high in terms of its artistic content, it nevertheless still manages to hit enough of its targets to warrant a look, which is more I can say for most of the more self-important titles currently in release.