\n\tThe 1990s were a banner decade for guilty-pleasure trash, particularly the female-driven thrillers that popped up with dependable regularity. At the somewhat classier end of the spectrum were The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Single White Female, while movies like Mortal Thoughts and Poison Ivy occupied the more lurid middle ground and howlers like the truly dreadful Hush landed at rock bottom \u2014 though let\u2019s be honest, who doesn\u2019t want to watch Jessica Lange as a Kentucky horse rancher go nuts and try to kill daughter-in-law Gwyneth Paltrow so she can steal her baby? As I suspected, nobody.<\/p>\n
\n\tAnyone nostalgic for those blissfully ludicrous nights at the multiplex will get a kick out of The Housemaid<\/a>, adapted by Rebecca Sonnenshine from the novel by Freida McFadden, the nom de plume of a practicing brain surgeon, seriously. A lobotomy might be useful to buy all the shock twists and turns of this preposterous story and director Paul Feig<\/a> too often holds back rather than fully leaning into its campy sensationalism and arch comedy. But holiday counterprogramming doesn\u2019t get much juicier.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\tThe Housemaid\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n \tMop up that blood!<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\tRelease date<\/strong>: Friday, Dec. 19 \n\tThe highlight is Amanda Seyfried<\/a> as Nina Winchester, a well-heeled Real Housewife of Great Neck, or Hell, who hires Sydney Sweeney<\/a>\u2019s troubled young Millie Calloway as a live-in domestic to help out in her palatial home with cleaning, light cooking and nannying of Nina\u2019s creepy-cold 7-year-old daughter Cece (Indiana Elle), an untalented ballerina with a perennially sour demeanor.<\/p>\n \n\tBut after being all sunshine and smiles over tea and a charcuterie board while interviewing Millie and showing her around the immaculate house, Nina turns increasingly psychotic once her new help moves in. Seyfried\u2019s saucer eyes take on the glazed but crazed look of a real-life M3GAN<\/a> as she tears up the house in a fury and starts gaslighting Millie in demeaning ways that make the other viper moms in Nina\u2019s PTA circle look like angels.<\/p>\n \n\tWithout giving too much away, Millie doesn\u2019t need glasses but wears them to look serious, though she\u2019s slow to pick up on the danger signals of the Winchesters\u2019 groundskeeper, Enzo (Michele Morrone). She\u2019s on a conditional release from prison with five years left on a sentence we\u2019ll learn about later. But she\u2019s been living in her car and parole terms require her to have a job and an address. She\u2019s mildly concerned by the scratch marks on the inside of her tiny attic bedroom door and by Nina\u2019s erratic, controlling behavior, constantly contradicting herself even when Millie follows her instructions to the letter. But Nina has her in a bind and she knows it.<\/p>\n \n\tSeyfried and Sweeney play the class differences with relative subtlety, though the same can\u2019t be said for those PTA moms, who drop clanging hints about Nina\u2019s past mental instability, gossiping away as if Millie were not even in the room.<\/p>\n \n\tNina\u2019s handsome husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar<\/a>) is a more ambiguous figure, seeming to offer apologetic support to compensate for his wife\u2019s craziness, though his obsession with staying on top of her hair appointments to get her roots touched up points to underlying weirdness. As much as Millie tries to focus on the job requirements, she\u2019s not indifferent to Andrew\u2019s seeming flirtation, as indicated by an erotic dream.<\/p>\n \n\tThere\u2019s no ambiguity about his doting ice-queen mother (Elizabeth Perkins), a WASP monster who sniffs at her daughter-in-law\u2019s homemaking skills. Likewise Nina\u2019s lax dress code for her maid, who favors skimpy crop tops with lots of perky cleavage. Mother Winchester\u2019s bestowal on Andrew of the heirloom family dinnerware is a good sign that precious porcelain will be smashed.<\/p>\n \n\tWhile Seyfried is a hoot with Nina\u2019s screaming fits and whiplash turns between acts of kindness and scalding rage, Sweeney, it must be said, is kind of dull in the early action. Millie mostly nods in mute acquiescence at the unreasonable accusations and demands of her boss, quickly learning that trying to speak up for herself is futile. But the actress is given more to run with as the story gets increasingly unhinged and allegiances are formed and promptly shattered, allowing Millie to fight back.<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s impossible to say much more without spoiling the outrageous surprises, but let\u2019s just make it clear that nobody in the central power triangle is quite what they seem, in terms of either aggression or defenselessness, abusiveness or subservience. The violence and madness reach almost Grand Guignol levels, with #MeToo elements gradually stirred into the mix.<\/p>\n \n\tFeig finds devilish humor early on by having Nina constantly looming up suddenly behind Millie like a vampire from Sinners<\/a>. In one instance, she wheels around at the end of a conversation and drops an afterthought in an affectless monotone: \u201cOh, Millie, stay the fuck away from my husband.\u201d Amusingly, the PTA moms don\u2019t appear to have been sent that memo given their constant swooning over Andrew\u2019s dreamboat looks and saintly patience with his loon of a wife.<\/p>\n \n\tBut who\u2019s putting up with whom, and who ultimately gets the upper hand in the sadistic games chez Winchester? One thing\u2019s for sure, when Nina mentions during Millie\u2019s interview that Andrew is forever warning her someone\u2019s going to kill themselves on the precipitous winding staircase, there\u2019s a good chance one of them will take a fatal tumble should they make it through the other ordeals intact.<\/p>\n \n\tSonnenshine and Feig keep pulling out the rug from under our narrative expectations, though the Hitchcockian precision and even the gallows humor to make the eyebrow-raising goings-on as suspenseful as they are silly is missing. The director is working more in the vein of A Simple Favor<\/a> than Bridesmaids or Spy here, and it\u2019s too bad he couldn\u2019t sneak in more of the latter films\u2019 anarchic comic spirit.<\/p>\n
Cast<\/strong>: Amanda Seyfried, Sydney Sweeney, Brandon Sklenar, Michele Morrone, Elizabeth Perkins, Indiana Elle
Director<\/strong>: Paul Feig
Screenwriter<\/strong>: Rebecca Sonnenshine, based on the novel by Freida McFadden
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tRated R,
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t2 hours 11 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n