The Housemaid (Paul Feig, 2025)

Amanda Seyfried has been in the business of making movies on our screens for twenty-five years now. She was a teenager, a few years into her career, in 2004, she had a supporting role in Mean Girls, one of the most successful and beloved comedies of its era. Mamma Mia! would also go onto financial success at the box office, as well as a dedicated, loyal fanbase. Jennifer's Body wasn't so much a financial success, and was savaged by critics when it was released, but it found its audience later, an audience so outspoken, they caused the greater horror fandom to re-evaluate the film, recognizing it as the fun, intelligent, piece of social satire it is. Her role on HBOs Big Love, a popular show in the early days of "prestige television," brought her into the awareness of adults who might not have been so keen on teen comedies, an ABBA inspired musical or a teen horror satire. If you look at them, the three roles are different in the extreme, and Seyfried is a significant part of why these projects were successful and/or found core, loyal, vocal fan bases.

Maybe the choices of the roles she'd done between and after from these era defining favorites, maybe because all three focused heavily on the experiences of women, maybe because as a thin, blonde, blue eyed woman, Seyfried can be considered the embodiment of the more harmful societal standards of beauty. In truth, it's probably some complicated combination of all of these things, but it wasn't until 2022 and her performance in the limited series, The Dropout, she began being considered the kind of actor who could deliver top tier, standout work.

Seyfried has put her foot on the metaphorical gas, and has been making interesting work, drawing attention for its quality since. At the end of 2025, she released The Testament of Ann Lee, which she also produced, and wherever critics have fallen on the film as a whole, as it sounds like a bold experiment in storytelling that may not work for everyone, there's been a universal marveling at her performance. I haven't seen it yet, but the combination of word of mouth, an appreciation for Seyfried's other work and what I've just seen in The Housemaid, I plan to catch soon.

At almost the same time The Testament of Ann Lee was released, The Housemaid hit theaters. It is, in a way, a throwback to the kinds of erotic thrillers which were popular in the eighties and nineties that have nearly gone extinct since the turn of the century. With Seyfried starring and Paul Feig directing, himself a veteran of cult favorites like Freaks and Geeks and A Simple Favor, the original promotional materials suggested something fun and potentially interesting. Unfortunately for Seyfried, Feig and everyone else involved, the second lead, Sydney Sweeney, decided to announce during the press tour, that she preferred an "apolitical" stance as a celebrity artist to distancing herself from the degree she's become a poster child for Christian white nationalist culture warriors. The film was still relatively successful at the box office, but there's no question that in today's reality, no small portion of the audience the film should have been appealing to were at the same time seeing the controversy over Sweeney's apparent lack of discernment where collecting checks is concerned, whether they were the result of white nationalist obsession with her or not.

It's a shame too, because this is Amanda Seyfried's movie. The level of her commitment to this character and the unbridled, lack of self consciousness she attacks it with is a thing to behold, and makes for a really fun time at the movies. The film as a whole is perfectly tuned for this as well. It has a clear relationship, an ancestry, in the history of mad women in film history, from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane to Mommy Dearest to Fatal Attraction and the like. It's also an intelligent subversion of the worst of what those films had to say about gender, class and power. In a sly way, it gives Seyfried the chance to have her cake and eat it too, by exploring the kind of territory that gave the actors in those films the chance to demonstrate the power they could summon and project on film in roles that are entertaining because the characters are breaking the norms and taboos related to gender, while also dealing with why that's necessary in art and storytelling. It does this without Seyfried's character, Nina, ultimately being used as some kind of weapon to uphold those norms and taboos as a cautionary tale and treating her character as if she deserves punishment for that norm breaking.

The Housemaid, adapted from a best selling novel of the same name, is among the most clever and entertaining variety of erotic thriller. I haven't been among those lamenting the lack of the genre in the landscape of the 21st century. Like the number of terrible slashers I watched in the eighties and nineties, I often wonder if nostalgia for the genre is more about the time in the life of the individual or the culture and nation is what the nostalgia is about. There were so many sub par entries in the eighties and nineties, that it never felt like sifting through the dregs was worth it, even when weighed against what the better versions of those films could do. I can grant that experience and maturity might be helping create a new perspective on them, but few of them left enough of an impression that I've felt any need to revisit them since they were originally released. The Housemaid may just cause me to revisit some of those films, to investigate whether I need to reappraise them.

Maybe it's that Paul Feig also has a long career with comedy, but it's clear now, from The Housemaid and A Simple Favor, he has an ability to find the kind of tone in a premise that is nominally a thriller that doesn't solely rely on dread or the more overwrought versions of suspense that can cause these domestic/erotic thrillers to fail. He understands the suspense itself is fun, that it isn't punctured, but can be heightened with some comedic moments, lines and characters. It's clear he appreciates that some of Hitchcock's best work bordered on, that it could at times step over the line into camp, and why it can be a positive contribution to a story whose main emotional thread is suspense. There's mastery in how well tuned The Housemaid is for maximum entertainment, as a way to confront the audience with the dire nature of the reality that gives the film some very bleak undertones.

One can walk away from The Housemaid simply having had a really enjoyable time at the movies, but they'd have to exert effort not to consider what it's saying about the world into which the film was released. It's not trying to hide what it has to say, nor is it trying to shame the audience in their wanting to have a good time at the movies. Feig and company clearly understand the variety of criticism or commentary which suggests these are mutually exclusive, is plainly wrong, based on a false dichotomy.

This is mixed with a respectable sense of economy. It blows through it's two hour and eleven minute runtime. Nothing is lingered on too long, and nothing is sold short. Within the first ten minutes, it begins picking up speed, and by the end of the first hour, it feels like a runaway train. One of the pleasures of films like this, is that as an audience, we know there's a train wreck coming, and we can't stop watching to see just how it's going to happen.

Part of the reason I appreciate character protrayals of madness, is that it they are often a recognition, conscious or otherwise, of how restricting our social and cultural norms are. The Housemaid pulls off some great storytelling in making this part of its text. In both the character of Nina, and Amanda Seyfried's go for broke performance, it reveals the degree to which norm and taboo breaking are so often life saving and life affirming, despite how extreme they may look to the observer.

I did not expect to enjoy this anywhere near this much, and its given me the sense that maybe it is worth it to sit through the lesser versions of thriller and erotic thriller, if it's going to mean we occasionally get something this fun and entertaining.