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Never let it be said that I don’t do my homework. I do the research, I come prepared. In the past year alone, I’ve cracked open Life of Pi to review the Broadway National Tour on this very site, jumped head-first into the viral novel Clown in a Cornfield and classic thriller The Long Walk to better appreciate their film adaptations, and I’ve already broken the spine on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in preperation for Emerald Fennell’s upcoming Valentine’s Day treat.
I say all that to say, when I got the assignment to review The Housemaid, the Hollywood adaptation of Freida McFadden’s best-selling novel, I knew what I had to do: read the damn book. McFadden has become a juggernaut in the literary world over the past few years, topping Goodreads charts, leading the conversation on BookTok, and earning dedicated displays at Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million. Her books are, by all accounts, thrilling and trashy and disposable and pulpy and sexy and (your word, not mine) smutty. I do not read those novels because … well … surely I’m better than everyone else … right? I read Brontë, not McFadden!
Turns out, I am not better than anyone else. I am just, as the stereotype goes, another repressed middle-aged housewife. I devoured the novel in three days. I thought about what would happen next while I was making breakfast and taking the trash out. Hell, I’m even considering reading the sequel(s). Sure, The Housemaid might be the literary equivalent of fast food, but it’s really good fast food. It’s the McDonald’s fries of smut: fresh, crispy, and, most importantly, hot. I couldn’t wait for the movie.
Following the book with incredible fidelity (nearly beat-for-beat, and occasionally word-for-word in Rebecca Sonnenshine’s screenplay adaptation), Sydney Sweeney stars as Millie, a recent parolee looking for a job and a place to stay that isn’t her car. She finds both in a live-in housemaid position helping out Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried), a stay-at-home mom who doesn’t have time for menial tasks like cooking and cleaning because she’s too busy with her PTA meetings and hair appointments and tea times. The job seems easy enough at first: do laundry and empty the dishwasher and dust the mantle and pick young Cecelia (Indiana Elle) up from school, but as it turns out, Nina isn’t quite all there. To put it mildly.
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Her tantrums and outbursts cause Millie to walk on eggshells, and if it wasn’t for her sensible and understanding (and dashingly handsome) husband, Andrew (Brandon Sklenar), Millie would find this job irredeemable. Both Millie and Andrew quickly get sick of Nina’s hysterics, and can only find solace in the only other person who understands …
Sydney Sweeney has been at the center of much of the year’s conversation, very little of it any good for her or her career. All of that controversy, some unfortunate wordplay in a jeans commercial and some amateur internet sleuthing about her family’s political beliefs, seems to be hurting her box office receipts (her boxing biography, Christy, had one of the worst wide release openings of all time), which is a movie star’s literal currency. Whether all of this crap she’s getting is deserved or not (it feels a little dog-whistley to me, but her silence is quite loud), she’s in luck that The Housemaid is a total hit. We used to get these movies every other weekend in the ’90s (Michael Douglas paid for a couple houses with movies like this), but it’s a special treat in 2025.
We used to call them erotic thrillers, and now we call them smut, but whatever it’s called, Sweeney understands her role. She wears low-tops and short shorts, and, when the time comes, she bares it all, both literally (she exposes her full naked body on multiple occasions, and I wasn’t the only one — I hope — who noticed the constant and consistent shots of her bare feet) and figuratively (I think she’s a good and interesting actress!) for a movie that really needs it.
I’m not exactly sure Brandon Sklenar is the man of your dreams you imagine when you read books like McFadden’s, but he does at least look the part: more handsome tight end than boring business executive, though I suppose that is the point. When he struts through his home (the one so large they have an upper living room they hardly ever use) in his white-tank undershirt, he seems like the kind of guy who would call it a ‘wife pleaser’ instead of a ‘wife beater’. But you never really know people, do you? Certainly not characters in a viral BookTok book.
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The real highlight here is Amanda Seyfried, who can throw a temper tantrum with the best of them. She’s never really been one to chew the scenery, so you can really see her relish in this. If playing the dulcimer on The Tonight Show was her shameless audition for the Joni Mitchell biopic, her performance in The Housemaid is her attempt to get cast as Amanda Wingfield (The Glass Menagerie) or maybe even Norma Desmond when Sunset Boulevard gets revived again in three years. She’s theatrical in the great tradition of those canonized roles, she screams and slams and slaps and startles and sneers and smashes stuff and stomps around and spices the whole thing up.
With Seyfried as his frightening muse, director Paul Feig has finally gotten the chance to make the thriller he wanted to make with the Simple Favor films. Trapped in the comedy box after working (with Melissa McCarthy, mainly) on movies like Bridesmaids, Spy, and Ghostbusters, he’s fully made the transition to thriller trash (I thought he did that with A Simple Favor, but I’m just now being told those movies were, in fact, comedies.) It starts as a simple cat-and-mouse, and as the twist approaches (there’s always a twist), Feig seems like he desperately wants to give it away, adding in a few flourishes (that weren’t in the book) that either intend to hold an audience member’s hand or simply spill the beans. Don’t fall for it. If this is to be Feig’s Gone Girl (he’s much more Lifetime than Fincher), he needs to show more restraint.
The film’s biggest strength, after all, is its total commitment to being fast food. Feig’s fries aren’t quite as crispy as McFadden’s, but they are cheap and delicious nonetheless. It gives us everything we want: steamy showers, bitch slaps, and gender parity nudity. If this were the ’90s, it would be a VHS favorite. Seeing as it is (unfortunately) 2025, it ain’t gonna get any better than this. I might read the sequels, and I’d surely buy a ticket to see a sequel.
The Housemaid has a run time of 2 hours 11 minute, and is rated R for strong/bloody violent content, sexual assault, sexual content, nudity and language.
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Read the book The Housemaid by Freida McFadden