The Housemaid

The Housemaid, a thriller released late December, embodies that persistent feeling of someone watching you just on the edge of vision – an unease born from false clarity rather than ambiguity. Paul Feig opens with a stereotypical thriller storyline where a wife, Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried), torments her younger housemaid, Millie (Sydney Sweeney), but hides it from her husband, Andrew (Brandon Sklenar). He creates a palpable tension between the three characters: one of lost love, one of new desire, and one of terror. This assumption is upheld until Feig turns the plot on its head, shattering the character cliché. Sklenar’s possessive gripping touch around Sweeney in the opening signals this coming flip. Emotions cause his perfect façade to crack just a little, and yet the viewer is lost in the emotion of the scene and doesn’t attribute much importance to it.

Seyfried’s predatory behaviour is unpredictable, refusing to release tension. She walks the wire of psychotic breakdown, shifting between moments of extreme stillness, with eyes slightly too wide, and raging destruction, with framing that places her as the eye of the storm. Sklenar weaponises perfection, compelling trust despite a lack of reason to do so. This physically contrasts the few moments where emotions break this perfection: notably the singular scream he utters towards Seyfried and the character he becomes once he loses control over the women in his life. The bloody, begging Sklenar he eventually becomes as control slips, exposes his vulnerability, shattering the image he had once created. 

By withholding crucial information, Feig engineers a gap between what the audience knows and what the characters can see, making their choices feel wrong without ever being unrealistic. The shameless flirting between Sklenar and Sweeney feels so horribly cliché that they cause you to wonder why Sweeney falls for these lines we’ve heard over and over. The film frames manipulation as something easily recognised from a distance, yet nearly invisible to the person caught in it. The acts undergone in the attic strip away restraint, turning mind games into a physical and moral collapse. Sweeney and Sklenar manage to outdo each other in each act; they force the other to perform. Their portrayal of the pain makes the scenes feel all too realistic, exposing Sklenar’s hatred for imperfection and Sweeney’s disgust towards manipulation.

The final scene of the movie lands on the theme of female abuse. Sweeney’s interview as the housemaid to another abusive household reminds the viewer why Seyfried needed rescue in the first place, bringing back the lines from Seyfried’s exposition. She blames the position she has ended up in as the product of a society that could not believe the wrong of a perfect man, therefore blaming the woman he supported. This stark calling out is easily forgotten amidst the plot twist, but should nevertheless serve as insight into the way women’s voices can be so easily destroyed with careful manipulation. It has been evident in many daily situations and still remains a constant presence. 

Manipulation is easily recognised from a distance, yet nearly invisible to the person caught in it.

The Housemaid ultimately understands the mechanisms of manipulation it depicts, but it refuses to sit with their consequences. By framing abuse as a twist to be uncovered rather than a reality to be endured, the film grants the audience distance where discomfort was required. In resolving abuse as spectacle rather than consequence, The Housemaid grants its audience the same comfort it pretends to interrogate.