Director Paul Feig is known for broad comedy; now he cranks up the schlock-serious dial for an outrageously enjoyable – or at any rate enjoyably outrageous – psycho-suspense thriller in the spirit of 90s erotic noir, adapted by screenwriter Rebecca Sonnenshine from the 2022 bestseller by Freida McFadden. We are back in the sleazy, glossy world of Curtis Hanson’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle or Joe Eszterhas’s Basic Instinct, but skating quite close, though not too close, to satire.
The scene is a bizarrely opulent mansion somewhere in upstate New York, splendidly isolated among a sea of bland suburban housing; it is approached by a drive, once you have got past the electronic gates. And it is down this avenue that Millie (Sydney Sweeney) nervously drives, wearing fake glasses to make herself look more mature, to apply for the job of live-in housemaid to the wealthy couple that lives there; she is hoping her prospective employers will not notice the worrying inconsistencies in her CV. She is greeted with smiley, Stepford-blond blandness by Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried), who appears to adore Millie, and explains that the job entails cooking, cleaning and looking after her young daughter, Cece (Indiana Elle).
But on her very first day on the job, poor Millie discovers that the house, a perfect Martha Stewart show home when she first saw it, is now squalid chaos, and Nina is screaming with spiteful rage, blaming Millie for everything, the result of apparently having missed her meds. Her husband, Andrew (Brandon Sklenar), as handsome as a young Alec Baldwin, reassures Millie that all is well; Millie finds herself fatally attracted to him, as well as grateful for his kindly interventions to prevent her from being fired from a job she badly needs. The sexual tension is unbearable. But what is going on? Is the behaviour of either what it seems? Is Millie being groomed for something?
We get some tastily over-the-top acting and some huge rewind POV shifts to explain what has really been going on – and, of course, the heady whiff of gaslight as Millie can’t quite be sure she really understands anything that’s happening. Silly it may be, but Feig and his cast deliver it with terrific gusto; this is an innocent holiday treat.
• The Housemaid is out on 19 December in the US, 25 December in Australia and 26 December in the UK.
