Breasted Boobily To The Stairs: The Movie.

There is a specific brand of suburban rot that Paul Feig seems increasingly comfortable inhabiting. After the fizzy, gin-soaked mayhem of A Simple Favor and its sequel, he returns to the world of well-dressed women behaving badly in The Housemaid, an adaptation of Freida McFadden’s 2022 BookTok juggernaut. It may position itself as a return to the erotic thrillers which briefly dominated cinema screens in the early nineties but really, it’s a supermarket checkout potboiler: sleek, manipulative, and relentlessly eager to please. And for the most part, it succeeds – as a trashy piece of postfeminist pulp.

Desperation drives Millie Calloway (Sydney Sweeney) into the orbit of the Winchesters, a family residing in a Long Island fortress of curated timber, glass and entitlement. As an ex-convict living out of her car, the live-in position represents a lifeline, yet Millie is almost immediately thrust into the centre of a psychological skirmish between the high-strung Nina (Amanda Seyfried) and her impossibly gallant and patient husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar).

Sweeney might be the headline-hogging cast name but it’s Amanda Seyfried who’s the undeniable engine of The Housemaid, delivering a performance of such calculated, volatile energy that she effectively carries the first two acts. She oscillates from maternal warmth to terrifying, unblinking rage and back like an unbalanced psychological metronome and an ease that keeps the audience in a state of constant discomfort. Whether Nina is a victim or a villain in her own right is a question Seyfried weaponizes, ensuring that even the most telegraphed plot twists feel fun to get to.

The film’s reliance on Sydney Sweeney as the central viewpoint, however, is one of the movie’s missteps. Sweeney spends much of The Housemaid in a state of blank-eyed disaffection (which Quint from Jaws could describe in much greater detail), a choice that perhaps aims for mousy and mysterious but often lands closer to sleepwalking disassociation. When the script eventually demands a total character pivot in the final act, Sweeney struggles to bridge the gap between the victimised domestic staff and the steelier figure that must emerge. It’s a performance of surface-level reactivity that lacks any sign of the internal friction and life required to make the film’s big reveal feel ferocious rather than just frothily therapeutic.

At the apex of The Housemaid’s toxic triangle is Andrew Winchester, played by Brandon Sklenar. Andrew presents as the perfect husband, all soft-edged chivalry and bottomless understanding of his wife’s volatility, the calm centre to Nina’s storm, yet Feig ensures there is just enough ambiguity in his “saviour” routine to keep things feeling unstable, especially when Elizabeth Perkins pops in as the frosty Winchester matriarch, delivering a masterclass in disdain and serving her lines as if they were sharpened glass.

Feig, for his part, understands that this material is at its best when he leans into its lurid absurdity. He treats the McMansion like a Gothic castle, with the camera stalking through the corridors and ensuring the lens is well positioned to catch Sweeney breasting boobily down any of the improbably numerous staircases the house seems to contain. Feig’s maximalist indulgences are on full display, and while the film occasionally groans under the weight of its own contrivances, it maintains a compulsive energy that carries it over its more ridiculous narrative conveniences and its rote soft-core sex scene centrepiece.

In its final third, The Housemaid is stops pretending to be a serious psychological thriller and embraces its juicy retribution fantasy roots in full-throated fashion. Feig makes the sensible choice to tighten the novel’s more languid, cruel conclusion, trading the book’s static prolonged denouement for a more visceral, shared catharsis. By condensing the timeline and increasing the physical stakes, the film ensures the payoff is a collaborative act of survival rather than a slow-motion execution. The Housemaid is an unapologetically trashy and highly effective as a piece of commercial entertainment, and even if it leaves you wondering what a more capable lead might have done with the role of Millie, you’ll still want to see what happens next after the sequel baiting final scene.