Here’s a genre that’s been missing in theaters for quite a while, the psychosexual thriller.  Back in the Eighties and Nineties, these films often featured A-listers doing all kinds of bad things, and actually bared skin when getting physical.  As a result, younger moviegoers raised on equivalent PG-13 movies probably believe that the proper way to have sex is with all of your clothes on, but I digress.  The Housemaid is a delightfully twisted and horny film, featuring three incredibly handsome actors who make a lot of bad choices.  As an added bonus, if you see it in a theater you can relive the glory days of R-rated cinema, when adults chose to get hot and bothered in a theater, in the dark, while surrounded by strangers.  Communal experiences like that are to be cherished.

Before diving headfirst into lasciviousness, The Housemaid opens with intrigue.  The very pretty Millie (Sydney Sweeney) applies for a job as a housemaid at a gated home that comes with a groundskeeper who glares at her ominously.  (They come with every palatial estate, I hear.)  Her prospective employer is the giddy Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried), who is pampered to  perfection.  Her home is a model of extravagance, with several floors, a spiral staircase, gleaming appliances, and so on.

Millie tries hard to make a good impression–she even wears glasses to look studious and hardworking.  Although Nina is pleased at the end of the interview, Millie is pessimistic.  She lied on her resume and assumes she’ll be found out when Nina does a background check, and drives off believing that she’ll never hear from Nina again.

That night, we get a window into Millie’s desperate situation.  She sleeps in her car and is awakened by Police the following morning.  (If only the police paid as much attention to empty parking lots as they did actual criminals.)  Millie tries to lie as to why she’s there, but is rescued by a phone call from Nina.  Magically, she’s hired.  Millie offers to start that afternoon, and washes off in a public restroom before heading over.

At the Winchester estate, Millie finds the home a wreck.  Nina tells Millie where to find the cleaning supplies and bounces off.  Hours later, Millie is coldly admonished by Nina’s daughter Cecelia for standing on the furniture.  Nina tells her not to worry and introduces her tall, dark and handsome husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar).  He’s taken aback when Nina tells him that Millie will be living in the guest room, but Nina’s happy so he goes along with it.

After making dinner, Millie excuses herself to her room.  Nina visits with a tray, how nice.  Millie asks if the only window could open and for the key to the door.  Unlike everything in the house, the latch has signs of wear and tear.  That night, Millie dreams of hooking up with Andrew and wakes up with a start.  Oh no, she tells herself.  No, no, no.  Don’t even think about it.  (We certainly are.)

The following morning, Millie finds Nina having a tantrum.  She can’t find her notes for a presentation and accuses Millie of throwing them out.  Andrew calms Nina down and throws Millie a look that says, “Yes, my wife is crazy but I love her anyway.  Apologies?”  Despite Nina’s apparent manic-depressive tendencies, Millie stays on because she needs the job.

Subsequent days bring more irrational behavior from Nina.  She asks Millie to watch Cecelia (Indiana Elle) on a Saturday, but Cecelia can’t because she has plans.  Andrew says that he’ll spend the day with Cece instead, and it’s clear that he’s a very handsome white knight with the patience of a saint.  Definitely too good to be true.

Millie’s plans involved a mandatory meeting with her probation officer.  If Millie can’t hold a steady job she’ll need to go back to prison to serve the remaining five years of a fifteen year sentence.  Why was she in prison?  That will have to wait.  For now, Millie knows it’s better to deal with a nut job on the outside than live in a gray cell with bars.

Nina tries to make amends by giving Millie some of her old clothes.  Oh, and she needs Millie to make plans for her and Andrew to spend the night in town.  Millie makes the arrangements, but then Nina tells her that she booked everything on a day when she and Cece will be out of town and will need to pay her back.  When Millie says she doesn’t have the money, Andrew says he’ll get a refund.

Unfortunately, nothing was refundable, so Andrew proposes that he and Millie go out together.  (Uh oh.)  Millie puts on one of Nina’s outfits and looks stunning.  The two enjoy a show, have a romantic dinner and head to their now-separate rooms.  But when Millie receives a series of angry texts from Nina, she runs to Andrew.  He consoles her by saying he’ll fix it with Nina.  Then, when the sexual tension between them is too obvious to ignore, he really consoles her.

When Andrew and Millie return, Nina angrily confronts them over what she knows they did.  Andrew finally has had enough and tells her to leave.  Before Nina drives through the gate, she screams in agony.  Back inside, Andrew and Millie continue exploring each other’s bodies.  

At this point, what I’m describing sounds like a Lifetime movie with better production values and nudity.  However, we’ve only reached the midpoint, and there’s much, much more in store.  After a household mishap lands Millie in confinement, two flashback sequences explain Nina’s bizarre past, what led to Millie’s prison stay and who’s the bad person in this ménage à trois.  The fun is just getting started.

Recommendation

The Housemaid won’t appear on any critic’s best ten lists for 2025, receive any Academy Award nominations or be regarded as the high point of anyone’s careers, but none of that matters.  The movie is a thoroughly entertaining journey through all kinds of bad behavior, including lust, sex, violence and unhinged bitchiness.  Best of all, the movie also understands that showing some skin is absolutely necessary, like the cherry on top of a sundae.

What makes The Housemaid such a fun, over-the-top thriller, is when it delivers “the twist”.  Many films save this for the end, but this movie explains everything with two lengthy, mind-bending reveals smack-dab in the middle of the movie.  This gutsy move pays off brilliantly, because it leaves plenty of time for scenes of squirm-inducing torture, a darkly comedic role reversal and gloriously bloody retribution.  If that’s not enough to entice you, I don’t know what will.

Although the movie has three co-leads, Amanda Seyfried’s volatile performance electrifies everything that happens.  She delivers manic scenery-chewing of the highest order for the first half of the movie, as if she were channeling a character from a primetime soap opera like TV’s Dallas.  But when her character’s back-story is revealed, my feelings towards her character completely flipped.  I went from hating her psychotic, scheming rich girl to feeling very sympathetic towards her plight.  Not every actor can change how we perceive a character so convincingly over the course of a movie, and Seyfried does it exceptionally well.

Sydney Sweeney is known for her curves and sultry demeanor, both of which overshadow her skill as an actress.  She’s a low-energy Scarlett Johansson, more deadpan than funny, but generally a better actress than she’s given credit for.  Her other films released this year did terribly at the box office, but they allowed her to grow as an actress (Eden, Christy, Echo Valley).  There’s more to Sweeney than her sex goddess image, and her performance in this movie shows that she can do a lot more than command a man’s attention simply by being present.  She gets several of the film’s biggest laughs and exhibits a ferocity that proves she has the range to do more than set sheets on fire.

As the other cast member responsible for bringing the (body) heat, Brandon Sklenar does that and then some.  He’s more than capable at playing the hunky, down-to-Earth guy waiting for a troubled woman to make up her mind (see: It Ends With Us and Drop).  This movie finally gives Sklenar a role he can sink his teeth into, and he turns his handsomeness and folksy charm into something cunning and malicious along the lines of Channing Tatum in Blink Twice and Josh Hartnett in Trap.  People on social media have been fan-casting him as the next Batman, and regardless of whether that happens, he’s certainly going to be tapped for something big very soon.

If you enjoy watching well-made movies about beautiful people doing all the wrong things, The Housemaid is for you.  The trio of Amanda Seyfried, Sydney Sweeney and Brandon Sklenar make this trashy psychosexual thriller a blast.  Recommended.

Analysis

Sydney Sweeney and Brandon Sklenar, thank you for your service.  You reminded me how wonderful it is to see unclothed adults having sex on screen.  Given that I’ve mentioned this aspect of The Housemaid several times already, those who are reading this probably take me for some kind of pervert.  While that’s probably true, it doesn’t change my opinion that the pivot away from what used to be the norm in films made for adults has taken something valuable away from cinema.

It would be impossible to provide a rundown of all the R-rated thrillers that featured sex and nudity back in the Eighties and Nineties.  Some notable entries from that period include:

• Body Heat (1981)
• Blue Velvet (1986)
• Fatal Attraction (1987)
• Dead Calm (1989)
• Presumed Innocent (1990)
• Blue Steel (1990)
• Wild at Heart (1990)
• Basic Instinct (1992)
• Body of Evidence (1993)
• Malice (1993)
• The Color of Night (1994)
• Jade (1995)
• Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

As an example of how critical sex and nudity is to the impact of these films, consider Body Heat.  How exciting would that film have been if Kathleen Turner and William Hurt never removed their clothes, or their sex scenes happened off screen?  Same goes for Presumed Innocent, where the sex scene between Harrison Ford and Greta Scacchi marks the fulfilment of their workplace passion, but then reveals their different ambitions.  The Color of Night and Blue Steel aren’t good films, but their sex and nudity make them titillating.  On the other side of the spectrum, if you remove what makes Blue Velvet an R-rated film, the film loses its meaning.

The shift of the film industry towards PG-13 films is largely to blame.  Studios figure that they can make more money by not risking an R rating.  There probably is some truth to that, but my unscientific analysis of the situation is that for every teenager that gets to see a fully-clothed sex scene, an actual adult is alienated.  Adults who go to see films where characters get physical want to see more than the equivalent of heavy petting.

Another reason for the lack of actresses bearing it all is the rise (sorry) of Google images.  What used to be limited to VHS tapes, DVDs and magazines is now discoverable in a single search.  I’m fully apprehensive of actresses not wanting their private parts on display for one and all, without context, all over the internet.  That kind of exposure isn’t what they signed up for originally, and is almost impossible to reign in after the fact.  Add to the situation pornographic deep fakes, and I understand why actresses prefer to keep all of their clothes on at all times.

Male nudity is a different issue.  A few actors like William Gere made a name for themselves by going full-frontal, but that was atypical.  Alexander Skarsgård appears to be carrying on the tradition these days.  Humorously, the trend on streaming has been for men to reveal their backsides.  Every time I watch a streaming show that lists nudity, I figure that I’ll only get to see a dude’s butt.  What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, I guess!

So in the first scene when Sweeney and Sklenar dropped trou and went at it, it felt like a curse on films made for adults had finally been broken.  To be clear, this scene and others weren’t just another instance of Sweeney being naked.  Sklenar’s backside is also fully visible as well.  The Housemaid offers equal opportunity nudity, just as God intended.

From the mouths of babes

The big question raised by the movie is whether what Nina did to Millie was justified.  To recap, she knowingly hired Millie to help draw the attention of her psychopathic and abusive husband.  Nina also acted like a crazy person to drive Andrew into Millie’s arms.  Nina positioned Millie as an irresistible honey trap in order to get herself and Cece away from the clutches of Andrew.  Nina did this knowing full well that Andrew would subsequently torture Millie into submission, just like he did to her.

Enter Cece as the movie’s conscience.  When Nina tells her that they’re free to live their lives now, Cece feels bad about it and says that they can’t leave Millie behind.  Nina rationalized her predatory actions because she didn’t want Andrew or his mother to take Cece away from her.  Keeping her daughter was all that mattered to Nina, and damn the consequences.

However, Cece feels guilty leaving Millie to face Andrew alone because she knows Millie doesn’t deserve what awaits her.  Cede reminds her mother that she must honor the bond of sisterhood and not allow Andrew to abuse Millie.   In other words, Nina’s ends don’t justify her means.  As a result, Nina realizes that she has to go back and rescue Millie, even though it may put her life back in danger.  I wonder if Millie ever found out that the surly little daughter–who she was convinced hated her–was the reason why Nina returned.

The movie later confirms the code shared between survivors of abusive men when the female police officer lets Nina off the hook for an obvious murder.  Justice is served when guys like Andrew are lying in a pool of their own blood.  Case closed.

Welcome back, Paul Feig.

About a decade ago, Feig was on a roll.  Bridesmaids (2011), The Heat (2103) and Spy (2015) were crowd-pleasing hits.  Then came Ghostbusters: Answer the Call (2016), a misfire that will forever be known for igniting a dumb culture war, but not for wasting the combined talents of the quartet of ladies involved.

Feig returned to form with A Simple Favor (2018), a stylish and sexy sleeper hit starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively in peak form.  For whatever reason, Feig’s next film was the goofy but earnest Last Christmas (2019), which I liked on both counts.  He then proceeded to wander in the wilderness for several years, making forgettable movies and television shows.  His previous two films, one starring Awkwafina and a sequel to his last hit, Another Simple Favor (2025), quickly came and went as straight-to-video releases.

Although Feig has a talent for comedy, he also excels at exceptional performances from his leading ladies, including Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Sandra Bullock, Kendrick and Lively.  In his movies, actresses get to play characters who are funny, sexy, flawed and complex.  I hope The Housemaid marks the beginning of another winning streak for Feig, because cinema is better with directors who bring out the best in their actresses.

Interesting touches

Nina says that Andrew will give Millie his TED talk on why Barry Lyndon is underrated. When Millie watches it later, she falls asleep.  Yes, this is after she went without food for days, carved her stomach twenty-one times and fought her way out of Andrew’s discipline room.  But, I suspect Feig was intentionally taking a shot at one of Film Twitter’s celebrated films.

Andrew is a huge fan of Richard Dawson’s “Family Feud”, and he and Millie watch it on several occasions.  Seems odd that of all the things the two could watch, it would be the Game Show Central channel on Pluto TV.

Why are the slices of bread of Millie’s victory sandwich so huge?

Seeing Elizabeth Perkins playing Andrew’s white-haired ice queen of a mom was hilarious.  The role couldn’t be any further from her early comedic roles in Big (1988) and He Said, She Said (1991).  I guess she hung around Hollywood long enough to play the villain.

There’s nobody more evil than a rich, White guy with time on his hands.

The groundskeeper character is completely unnecessary.  He only exists to stare menacingly at Millie and then scare her, which leads directly to her punishment.  Some ally of women he turned out to be!