Brandon Sklenar

The Housemaid (2025)

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While my partner’s father was in town, we planned to go out and see Eternity, which still sufficiently piqued my interest despite Brandon’s (admittedly semi-positive) indifference to it, and it seemed like something that would be palatable for this kind of outing. Unfortunately, either I or someone responsible for updating the local chain theater’s showtimes made an error, so we arrived ninety minutes earlier than the next showtime, and instead opted to wait only half an hour to check out the most recent Sydney Sweeney vehicle, The Housemaid. I admit that the trailer had me intrigued, as it looked like the kind of trashy erotic thriller that we don’t see many of anymore, but I’ve also soured on Sweeney of late, so despite my lifetime adoration of co-lead Amanda Seyfried, I planned to sit this one out. Fate put me in that reclining seat of the Regal this past weekend, and I have to admit, I was entertained. I missed his name in the opening credits, but by the midpoint of this film, I knew that it was a Paul Feig production, so it was no surprise when his name appeared at the film’s conclusion. It’s strange to be able to pick up on that despite having only seen four of his twelve features (including this one), but there’s a certain inexplicable essence that’s unmistakably his; this has the same energy as A Simple Favor and an identical star rating, which is solid if unremarkable. Not that I’m judging him, really. I’m probably the last living person who ever thinks about Other Space, which I rather liked. 

Millie (Sweeney) is a recently paroled former inmate who was wrongfully convicted due to the friend whose assault she ended failing to corroborate her testimony. After serving ten years, she’s living in her car and can hardly believe her luck when her interview with Nina Winchester (Seyfried) to be the Winchester family’s live-in housemaid goes well and she’s hired. Although Nina’s eight-year-old daughter Cecilia is cold to Millie, Nina’s husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) begins with puzzled courtesy that predictably escalates to some hot and heavy adultery. Millie only falls into Andrew’s charms, however, because of a constant campaign of gaslighting on Nina’s part. She tersely demands that she pick up Cecilia from ballet the same night that she’s supposed to sleep over at a friend’s in order to embarrass Millie. Nina instructs Millie to purchase Broadway tickets and an overnight stay at a hotel for Nina and Andrew in the city and then berates her for doing so for the date requested, when Nina will be driving Cecilia to camp. Andrew ends up taking Millie on the date night, getting them separate rooms when they’ve had too many cocktails to go back to Long Island, but they ultimately give in to their lusts. When Andrew finally throws Nina out after yet another outburst, Millie quickly moves into Andrew’s bed, but it isn’t long before she starts to wonder if she put too much stock in the local gossip about Nina’s past psychological history and their petty sniping about how Andrew was too good for her. 

Since I didn’t expect I would be seeing this movie, I allowed myself to be spoiled by an early review for it. I’ll happily confirm that what one would probably expect based solely on the trailer for the film isn’t quite the narrative that you’re in for. It’s much like A Simple Favor in that it’s recognizably a narrative born of a mind that’s burdened with the knowledge of far too many Lifetime thrillers. Recurring tropes of that genre abound: the overbearing mother (Elisabeth Perkins plays Andrew’s with icy perfection despite very little actual screentime), the single mom easily entrapped by a wealthy man, the gaslighting employer, the new domestic servant’s room being an isolated place that may as well be a cell, the too-perfect husband, the backbiting PTA friends, the elaborate gambits that play out satisfactorily if not necessarily sensibly. You have until the end of this paragraph to jump ship if you want to go into the film with no foreknowledge. To his credit, Feig understands that the modern audience needs a wider array of eroticism. One of the things that I thought about while watching Dressed to Kill recently was that erotic thrillers of the bygone eras were designed to sexually stimulate only those who get a thrill out of watching a woman undress and shower. Feig is an equal opportunity titillator, as while the camera lovingly showcases Sweeney’s toned abs and voluptuous bosom, it spends just as much time ogling Sklenar’s chiseled abdomen and statuesque physique; we even linger on a shot that invites us to dwell on his sculpted derriere while he brushes his teeth, and let’s not even get into the muscle-hugging tank tops that leave very little of the actor’s areola to the imagination. While Sweeney sleepwalks through her lines, Seyfried is knocking it out of the park with a performance that vacillates between seemingly sincere remorse and seething, feral ferocity. She gives a performance that’s on par with Jennifer Lawrence’s in Die My Love, and it’s perhaps too good for the kind of movie that it is: elevated schlock from someone whose brain was warped by seeing Mother May I Sleep With Danger? one too many times after school. It’s nothing all that novel, but it’s twisty and entertaining enough, and if my packed screening is any indication, it’s effectively reaching its target market (BookTok teens). 

Spoilers ahoy. I can’t sufficiently divorce the film as I saw it from the plot outline I already knew to parse exactly how I would have felt if I had seen the film in a vacuum with no prior knowledge. It certainly felt to me that Nina’s treatment of Millie was within the realm of reality of what it must be like to be a contemporary housemaid for a privileged family, even if the narrative requires that Millie either stick it out or go back to prison in order to justify why she tolerates the escalating tensions. On the other hand, one doesn’t go into a thriller without expecting the other shoe to drop eventually, and I don’t think that anyone in the audience is going to make it to about the forty-five minute mark and think that Millie is going to live happily ever after with Andrew and Cecilia after Nina is banished from the Winchester estate. One might think that Nina might then return for revenge, perhaps with the assistance of her groundskeeper Enzo (Michele Morrone), or that Millie herself has been lying to us in her narration all along and she’s going to play black widow to Andrew now that Nina is out of the way. But to get to that conclusion, one has to ignore (what feels like) heavy-handed foreshadowing of Andrew’s hidden sociopathy. Sklenar pulls out the same charm that made him such a magnetic romantic lead in Drop, and its effectiveness is going to vary depending on whether or not he seems too perfect to be believed from the very beginning. Even knowing that going in, I didn’t have all of the details of how Millie would get the upper hand and how the power dynamics would further shift between the relevant trio. (It’s worth noting that the ending is changed from the source novel as well, meaning that even fans of the book are in for some surprises.) My desire for a twisty thriller was satiated. It’s not one that I would rush to see in a theater, but once it’s available for no-additional-cost streaming on one of the services you already have, you’ll have a better time than if you watch one of David DeCoteau’s twenty-eight (and counting) The Wrong… films. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Drop (2025)

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Watching all of those Final Destination movies in a single week must have rewired my brain, because I spent the first forty minutes of Drop waiting for a huge disaster to occur. After the film opens on a flashback to protagonist Violet (Meghann Fahy)’s final altercation with her violent, abusive husband as her infant watches, we cut forward to the present, where she is planning to go on her first date since then, leaving her now Pre-K aged son Toby with her sister, Jen (Violett Beane). This is the first time she and her son have been apart, and she’s understandably nervous. As we have all already seen this trailer (presumably many times), we know that on this date she is going to begin receiving airdropped directions to do something awful to her companion, we spend the first several minutes after her arrival to the (begging to be a Final Destination location) restaurant meeting all of the potential subjects. There’s Matt (Jeffrey Self), the UCB hopeful and waiter who’s on his first shift and whose oversharing about his sketch ideas may be either an actual annoying character trait or a cover for his activities; there’s pianist Phil (Ed Weeks), who attempts to hit on Violet sleazily before he’s warned off by bartender Cara (Gabrielle Ryan), who seems very invested in Violet’s first date; there’s Richard (Reed Diamond), a nervous man who approaches Violet thinking that she might be the blind date he’s been set up with before meeting his actual date; there’s also Connor (Travis Nelson), a handsome man that Violet bumps into on two separate occasions, which may have given him access to clone her phone; and finally the hostess (Sarah McCormack), whose access to all of the security cameras gives her a bird’s eye view that may be what’s enabling Violet’s harassment. By the time her date, Henry (Brandon Sklenar), arrives, we’ve got quite the list of potential suspects to keep us guessing about who’s behind the home invasion that Violet witnesses on her phone via her home security cameras, with the threat against Jen and Toby used to force Violet to steal from Henry and potentially murder him. 

The date starts casually enough, with Henry having the patience of multiple saints as Violet keeps checking her phone fairly constantly throughout the date, which she attributes to separation anxiety from her son. She shares the first couple of things that are airdropped to her with Henry; they’re mostly memes to get her attention, but quickly turn into threats and directions to destroy a memory card that Henry, who is the mayor’s photographer, has in his camera bag. This is the first clue that we get to the purpose of the unknown dropper’s motives, as we see there are photos of some documents which may point to corruption in Chicago’s upper echelons. Once this is complete, she’s directed to retrieve something from the paper towel dispenser in the ladies’ room, which turns out to be a vial of poison that she must use against Henry. It’s all a fairly tense affair, and it’s fun to watch Violet figure out reasons to keep going back to the washroom or direct Henry to help her look for her watch, while she also tries to figure out how to ask for help despite her every movement being monitored. The final climax of the film goes for a full-on action sequence as the identity of the dropper is revealed and Violet manages to get the upper hand, but not before they direct their accomplice to kill Jen and Toby, which means Violet has to race home and try to stop the assassin, in a mirror of her first scene in which her husband threatened her and baby Toby with a handgun. 

This is a pretty decent premise, and one that’s followed through upon well. It bears mentioning that the narrative has a lot of the same plot beats as the 2005 Wes Craven picture Red Eye starring Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy. In that flick, McAdams’s character is a hotel manager who is blackmailed under threat of deadly violence against her father into moving a political appointee into a specific suite so that Murphy’s terrorist organization can complete an assassination. Like Violet, she too experienced a horrific event just a couple of years earlier that left her unwilling to give up, and the fury of which she channels into attacking her aggressor before rushing home to save her threatened family. Both films are very much of their era, as the earlier film explicitly labels Murphy a domestic terrorist and the object of his violence is associated with the Department of Homeland Security, making it a clear example of Bush era domestic terror politics. In this one, not only is the target of the killer’s ire someone who’s looking to expose corruption (and therefore automatically a hero), but the film’s entire gimmick centering around the whole “airdrop” smartphone element feels like a premise that should have been done a couple of years ago when that was a newer feature. One gets the feeling that this one will seem just as much like an unintentional period piece as Red Eye in just a few years, although I’m not certain it will have the same punch two decades from now that Red Eye still does today. 

Fahy is great here, and it’s fun to see her again after her stellar run on the second season of White Lotus, especially since she was also in the much maligned The Unbreakable Boy earlier this year, which had the misfortune of shooting in 2022 and then being shelved until after Fahy gained more recognition. Sklenar is attractive as Henry and definitely fits the mold of a handsome leading man, but I couldn’t help but notice how much chemistry Violet and Cara had from the outset, and in between wondering when the penthouse restaurant was going to fall out of the sky like the opening scene of Final Destination: Bloodlines, I kept thinking that Violet should just skip her date and make out with Cara instead. Even when my suspicions fell on Cara as the airdropper (or a conspirator thereof), I was still kind of rooting for a sapphic resolution to the story. 

This is exactly the kind of mid-budget thriller that movie studios used to churn out at a rate of a dozen a year, a quickly cobbled together script that took some recent tech news item and ran with it to craft a thriller around, usually relying on the audience’s general lack of tech savvy to be effective. I’ve never owned an iPhone and thus have never sent or received an airdrop (although they are careful to never use any of Apple’s branded products or tech names and even their use of the fiery Elmo meme replaces the Muppet with a generic stuffed animal), so I have no idea how plausible or implausible this is as a technological MacGuffin. I saw this with a few friends, some of whom are iPhone users, and they mentioned that this would have been more believable several years ago before everyone turned off the default airdrop “receive” setting, as most folks have stopped accepting airdrops as it largely became a method for pervs and other creeps to spam a given area with unsolicited dick pics. I have to take their word for it. For a nice, easy thriller that doesn’t require too much mental energy, Drop is decent, and fun enough for what it is. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond