THE HOUSEMAID (2025) Review

There is a version of The Housemaid that probably works.

You can see the outline of it. The bones are there. This story clearly wants to dig into some loaded material involving a woman’s place in modern life, the power imbalance inside marriage, the pressures of parenthood, and the lingering damage of past trauma. That is not small stuff. And to the film’s credit, it at least gestures toward all of it.

The problem is that The Housemaid never really says anything with those ideas. It just parks them in the background and keeps moving. They are present, sure. They hang over the movie. But they are treated more like decorative themes than meaningful ones. They never get developed in a way that gives the film weight, insight, or even much conviction. So what you are left with is a movie that looks like it has substance, while mostly operating on surface appeal.

And on that surface level, I will say this much: the film is not without its pleasures.

This is a sleek, glossy, sexy thriller with a very attractive cast and some genuinely appealing aesthetics. The mansion at the center of the story is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and honestly, it earns its keep. The film knows how to frame wealth, desire, and dysfunction in a way that is easy on the eyes. Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar make for a striking power couple on paper, and there is enough visual polish here to keep the thing watchable even when the storytelling starts wobbling.

Seyfried, in particular, understood the assignment. She gives the kind of committed, unhinged performance that at least injects some life into the movie. She is playing this material with real conviction, and there were stretches where I found myself wishing the entire film had just followed her lead. The issue is that Seyfried feels like she wandered in from a much sharper, more daring movie than the one everyone else is making.

As for Sydney Sweeney, I say this as someone who is generally a fan of hers: she is out of her element here. Since I am keeping this spoiler-free, I cannot fully unpack why the performance did not land for me, but the simplest way to put it is this: the journey of her character does not line up with where the movie wants her to end up. Millie is introduced as quiet, meek, shy, submissive, and desperate. That setup matters. It defines how we are meant to read her, how we are meant to understand her choices, and how the film wants to position her inside this world. Then the final act arrives, and suddenly she is operating with a fierceness, daring, and assertiveness that the movie simply has not earned.

Now, I have no issue with a “woman finding her voice” arc. Done well, that can be incredibly satisfying. But here, it feels abrupt. It feels like a hard swerve instead of an evolution. Maybe the book handles that transition with more care. Maybe there is more internal shading on the page that helps bridge the gap. I have not read the source material, so I cannot speak to that directly. What I can say is that in this film, the shift does not work. It feels less like a breakthrough and more like the screenplay suddenly deciding it needs her to become a different person.

And that gets to the larger problem with The Housemaid: tone.

This thing plays like a Lifetime movie dressed up in expensive fabric. Or maybe more accurately, like a Cinemax-at-midnight thriller from 1998. Remember those? The kind of movie that knew exactly what kind of trashy fun it was serving and just leaned all the way in? There is an alternate universe where The Housemaid commits to that energy and becomes a genuinely entertaining camp exercise.

That version, I might have loved.

But this movie keeps wavering between campy, soapy B-movie nonsense and sincere dramatic treatment of very serious subject matter. And that balancing act is where it really falls apart. One minute it wants to be glossy pulp. The next minute it wants to wade into mental health struggles, domestic violence, postpartum depression, and other heavy themes with a straight face. The handling of those ideas is clumsy at best and irresponsible at worst.

It is like one act wants to be Fifty Shades of Grey, and the next wants to be A Woman Under the Influence. And let’s be clear: it is absolutely not the latter.

That is not me asking for this film to suddenly become a Cassavetes drama. It is me asking it to pick a lane. If you want to make a trashy, seductive thriller with beautiful people behaving badly, go for it. There is an audience for that. I can be that audience. But if you are also going to invoke serious emotional and psychological material, you need a steadier hand than this movie has. You cannot use those issues like seasoning and then expect credit for depth.

By the end, I was mostly left wondering why this adaptation exists in this form beyond giving us two hours of hot people glowering at each other in a giant house while their lives spiral into upscale soap opera chaos. There is some fun to be had in the “sip the tea and watch the mess” aspect of it. I will not deny that. The film has style. It has eye candy. It has moments of campy dramatic tension that almost work. But it does not have the substance to support the themes it keeps brushing up against.

So in the end, The Housemaid lands right in that frustrating middle ground. It is not terrible. It is not a disaster. But it misses the mark in too many important ways to be much more than a glossy distraction.

🍿 SCORE = 55 / 100