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