After she is hired as the in-home hep for a wealthy family, Millie (Sydney Sweeney) realises the family is not picture perfect. But she is holding her own secrets which make leaving almost impossible…
Why do I not gel with Paul Feig?
When he made comedies, I was all in.
When he pivoted to thrillers with A Simple Favour, I thought it felt a little anodyne.
The Housemaid is the type of movie I gravitate to: an erotic thriller with sexy people doing terrible things to each other.
The movie certainly builds up a certain level of tension, but it is never that sexy.
I have been struggling to work out why and I think it is a combination of certain things: firstly, none of the actors have any real chemistry. The other element is shooting on digital. There is an inherent coldness to shooting on digital that removes any sense of eroticism. I think Fincher has figured out how to utilise it, in films like Gone Girl, and even The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but no-one else.
It does not help that the primary setting - the Winchester’s mansion, feels like a model home. There is a point behind the aesthetic, but at no point does it feel like this is a space where people live.
In the lead, Sweeney is a blank. There is some intentionality to this, but in the early running, when the character is dealing with the family’s increasingly disturbing dynamics, she never convinces as someone who is trying to hold onto her job. The character is in severe economic hardship, but you never get to one stakes coming from Sweeney’s performance.
The film wants to be about doubling, by casting Sweeney opposite Amanda Seyfried, an actress who you could describe as fitting the same archetype of a curvy blonde. But the film becomes about another kind of doubling - Hollywood’s double standard in casting actresses to film similar roles.
I could not stop comparing Seyfried’s performance to Sweeney, and how the film would have probably worked more successfully with Seyfried in Sweeney’s role.
I kept thinking about her role as an ambiguous femme fatale in Atom Egoyan’s Chloe - not a good movie, but Seyfried works so well as a young woman who appears to be both in over her head yet still unreadable.
It is not a perfect one-to-one of roles, but I spent the movie thinking about this mirror version.
I hope the movie’s success leads to more genre movies like this that are made for adults. I just do not think this is a particularly good one.
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