Amanda Seyfried and Sydney Sweeney Get Messy

The 1990s were a banner decade for guilty-pleasure trash, particularly the female-driven thrillers that popped up with dependable regularity. At the somewhat classier end of the spectrum were The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Single White Female, while movies like Mortal Thoughts and Poison Ivy occupied the more lurid middle ground and howlers like the truly dreadful Hush landed at rock bottom — though let’s be honest, who doesn’t want to watch Jessica Lange as a Kentucky horse rancher go nuts and try to kill daughter-in-law Gwyneth Paltrow so she can steal her baby? As I suspected, nobody.

Anyone nostalgic for those blissfully ludicrous nights at the multiplex will get a kick out of The Housemaid, adapted by Rebecca Sonnenshine from the novel by Freida McFadden, the nom de plume of a practicing brain surgeon, seriously. A lobotomy might be useful to buy all the shock twists and turns of this preposterous story and director Paul Feig too often holds back rather than fully leaning into its campy sensationalism and arch comedy. But holiday counterprogramming doesn’t get much juicier.

The highlight is Amanda Seyfried as Nina Winchester, a well-heeled Real Housewife of Great Neck, or Hell, who hires Sydney Sweeney’s troubled young Millie Calloway as a live-in domestic to help out in her palatial home with cleaning, light cooking and nannying of Nina’s creepy-cold 7-year-old daughter Cece (Indiana Elle), an untalented ballerina with a perennially sour demeanor.

But after being all sunshine and smiles over tea and a charcuterie board while interviewing Millie and showing her around the immaculate house, Nina turns increasingly psychotic once her new help moves in. Seyfried’s saucer eyes take on the glazed but crazed look of a real-life M3GAN as she tears up the house in a fury and starts gaslighting Millie in demeaning ways that make the other viper moms in Nina’s PTA circle look like angels.

Without giving too much away, Millie doesn’t need glasses but wears them to look serious, though she’s slow to pick up on the danger signals of the Winchesters’ groundskeeper, Enzo (Michele Morrone). She’s on a conditional release from prison with five years left on a sentence we’ll learn about later. But she’s been living in her car and parole terms require her to have a job and an address. She’s mildly concerned by the scratch marks on the inside of her tiny attic bedroom door and by Nina’s erratic, controlling behavior, constantly contradicting herself even when Millie follows her instructions to the letter. But Nina has her in a bind and she knows it.

Seyfried and Sweeney play the class differences with relative subtlety, though the same can’t be said for those PTA moms, who drop clanging hints about Nina’s past mental instability, gossiping away as if Millie were not even in the room.

Nina’s handsome husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) is a more ambiguous figure, seeming to offer apologetic support to compensate for his wife’s craziness, though his obsession with staying on top of her hair appointments to get her roots touched up points to underlying weirdness. As much as Millie tries to focus on the job requirements, she’s not indifferent to Andrew’s seeming flirtation, as indicated by an erotic dream.

There’s no ambiguity about his doting ice-queen mother (Elizabeth Perkins), a WASP monster who sniffs at her daughter-in-law’s homemaking skills. Likewise Nina’s lax dress code for her maid, who favors skimpy crop tops with lots of perky cleavage. Mother Winchester’s bestowal on Andrew of the heirloom family dinnerware is a good sign that precious porcelain will be smashed.

While Seyfried is a hoot with Nina’s screaming fits and whiplash turns between acts of kindness and scalding rage, Sweeney, it must be said, is kind of dull in the early action. Millie mostly nods in mute acquiescence at the unreasonable accusations and demands of her boss, quickly learning that trying to speak up for herself is futile. But the actress is given more to run with as the story gets increasingly unhinged and allegiances are formed and promptly shattered, allowing Millie to fight back.

It’s impossible to say much more without spoiling the outrageous surprises, but let’s just make it clear that nobody in the central power triangle is quite what they seem, in terms of either aggression or defenselessness, abusiveness or subservience. The violence and madness reach almost Grand Guignol levels, with #MeToo elements gradually stirred into the mix.

Feig finds devilish humor early on by having Nina constantly looming up suddenly behind Millie like a vampire from Sinners. In one instance, she wheels around at the end of a conversation and drops an afterthought in an affectless monotone: “Oh, Millie, stay the fuck away from my husband.” Amusingly, the PTA moms don’t appear to have been sent that memo given their constant swooning over Andrew’s dreamboat looks and saintly patience with his loon of a wife.

But who’s putting up with whom, and who ultimately gets the upper hand in the sadistic games chez Winchester? One thing’s for sure, when Nina mentions during Millie’s interview that Andrew is forever warning her someone’s going to kill themselves on the precipitous winding staircase, there’s a good chance one of them will take a fatal tumble should they make it through the other ordeals intact.

Sonnenshine and Feig keep pulling out the rug from under our narrative expectations, though the Hitchcockian precision and even the gallows humor to make the eyebrow-raising goings-on as suspenseful as they are silly is missing. The director is working more in the vein of A Simple Favor than Bridesmaids or Spy here, and it’s too bad he couldn’t sneak in more of the latter films’ anarchic comic spirit.

But the actors keep the wheels spinning through every bonkers development, particularly Seyfried, who swaps the ecstatic rapture of The Testament of Ann Lee for a different kind of hysteria — or is it clever calculation? — and Perkins, a ‘90s fixture just like the genre, making a welcome return to the spotlight with brittle imperiousness and a silvery-white Susan Powter crop. Sklenar nails the balance between friend and freak well enough, while Sweeney makes up for her character’s slow start, becoming increasingly ruthless when the tables are turned, something that happens more than once.

The Housemaid is maybe not quite as delicious as it could have been, and it’s about 20 minutes too long. But if you’re eager to escape the family over the holidays with a good-looking entertainment shot through with salacious nastiness and blood-stained perversion, look no further.