It’s been hard to know how to write about this movie even months after I saw it, because so much of the lore behind it is spoilers, but I think I can talk more generally about the film as a clear break in the negative coverage for Sydney Sweeney’s no good very bad press year which started with some objections to her wearing jeans and then extended to her defying stereotypes in a movie that apparently did poorly by historical standards. The Housemaid broke lots of records and for reasons that seem obvious now–the obsession with erotic thrillers, black box mysteries, actors from It Ends With Us that aren’t Justin Baldioni, and a return to the glory days of A Simple Favor and Gone Girl. The film relies on one of my favorite things, which you will probably recognize after having read through these review for a few years, the conditioning and rug pull of a misleading trailer, which–and now we’re getting into spoiler-y territory–alludes to the idea that Sweeney’s character will somehow become entangled in a romantically charged relationship with Brandon Sklenar’s Alex who has very patiently endured his erratic and scheming shrew (do shrews scheme?) of a wife played by the glorious Amanda Seyfried. Earlier this year, I’d gone to see Emma Stone in Bugonia only to be blessed with a supercut of Stone dancing through the years and it pains me to say that there does not seem to be a readily available supercut of Seyfried doing the same, though I demand that one be made.
Anyway, the magic of The Housemaid is the way that the movie follows through with a lot of these cheesy romance tropes of chaste infidelity from the help and the rich, shiny, emotionally in touch alpha husband, and the way that the bottom drops out of his movie and demands you reassess each of the ambivalent scenes that came before in the first act is really juicy. The second act has twists of its own and structurally interesting storytelling techniques and the whole experience of watching this movie and watching someone else’s brain melt while they watch makes it a good contender for a movie to be seen with a friend.
