Watching the Wives
Even as America spins out of control, the new trash cinema of Hollywood continues to flourish without much notice. The Housemaid, based on Freida McFadden’s blockbuster 2022 novel, stars Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried; Paul Feig directs from a script by Rebecca Sonnenshine. Sweeney’s the housemaid in question, Millie, a working-class woman on Long Island looking for a job. She needs it: she’s out on parole after serving 10 years of a 15-year sentence for… we’ll see… and she assumes the fabulous and fabulously rich Nina Winchester (Seyfried) will quickly find out she was in jail and never call her back. Instead, she offers Millie the job, a live-in position.
Everything’s coming up Millie until Nina starts to crack: she explodes, forgets things, spaces out, blames other people for her mistakes and puts others at danger. Her husband (Brendan Skenlar, the most compelling leading man in American movies now) is perfect, too perfect, and when he’s “finally had enough” of Nina going nuts, he kicks her out and assures Millie that he’s hers now. They’ll even get custody of Nina’s daughter! This happens about an hour into the movie, halfway through, and for a significant stretch, there are flashbacks that establish Nina as an equally impoverished and vulnerable woman who’s suffered at the hands and whims of her truly cuckoo husband (he locks Sweeney and Seyfried in the attic and forces them to mutilate themselves for various perverse psychosexual reasons, including his “beloved mother” played by Elizabeth Perkins. Shouldn’t they just fuck and get it over with?).
After a mid-movie half-hour expository catchup with wall-to-wall voice-over, we’re back with Millie and her new prison, harangued by the husband she thought she stole from the woman who wanted to escape all along. But the Seyfried character, however exhausted and worried for her young daughter, does go back to help Sweeney escape—at the urging of her daughter! “We have to get Millie.” When the husband’s finally taken out with a flight down the stairwell, Sean Young in No Way Out style, the responding officer sees through Seyfried’s story about him trying to change a lightbulb, but tells her her sister was engaged to the guy years ago, “and one night she came home crying and was never the same,” so she lets the suspicious cuts and missing teeth go. Vigilante sisterhood: it’s very now.
I saw the trailer for The Housemaid last month and tried to read the book, but McFadden makes Harrold Robbins look like George Eliot. Feig’s film is another example of the long established truism that bad books make good movies; at the very least, it’s easier to pull off The Housemaid than Jane Eyre. But The Housemaid is more than just a sleeper hit (and a much-needed success for Sweeney, who had a rough year studded with box office bombs and media backlash)—it’s another indicator of the current bloodlust, a sign of how far the lines have been pushed when it comes to violence and torture. Skenlar, who also starred in It Ends With Us, is as reassuring as he is scary, an authentic masculine presence next to the prettified (but good) Austin Butler and the hopelessly desperate and wimpy Timothèe Chalamet. I’ve only seen him play “the good boyfriend” before, and while he reiterates that in the first half of The Housemaid, he cracks in the second and shows us what a terrifying abuser he can be.
And we’ve always known he’s capable of this—Sklenlar’s compelling because he’s too good to be true, therefore suspicious, someone who looks like he’s snapped and screamed at women before, maybe hit them. That’s a level of vitality that simply isn’t present in most American actors his age (35). Sweeney and Seyfried are the unbeatable women we expect them to be, and they play The Housemaid to the rafters, aware and unashamed that they’re in the new American trash cinema. Why should they feel any “shame” at all? The Housemaid is a more accurate read of the average American mind today than any other film out in theaters now.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith