The Housemaid (2025)

The Housemaid arrives with a sealed attic window, a door that locks from the outside, and a wealthy Long Island household that treats domestic employment as a form of custody. Millie Calloway, recently paroled, takes the live-in position because the terms of her release require lawful work. Nina Winchester, her employer, is pregnant, mercurial, and prone to accusing the help of imaginary sins. Andrew Winchester, the husband, is charming in the way that expensive furniture is charming. Paul Feig directs all of this with the straight face of a man reconstructing a 1990s cable thriller from memory, and the results are glossy, mean, and a great deal more fun than they have any right to be.

The picture's social conscience is real but narrow. Two women endure a man who drugs, confines, and punishes them, and the film takes visible pleasure in their retaliation. Andrew receives a knife, a locked room, and a pair of pliers. Nina's backstory involves an IUD and a hundred pulled hairs, which the screenplay treats as evidence of the specific cruelty available to husbands with money and lawyers. The friction between the parolee and the Winchesters registers, though the villainy stays personal. Andrew is a monster, not a system. The china heirlooms get smashed because they look expensive, not because the film has a thesis about inherited capital.

Elsewhere the cultural inventory is thin. Race goes unmentioned. Queerness goes unmentioned. The climate does not appear. Nobody discusses body image, neurodivergence, or the reinterpretation of historical events. The remaining stock is suspense, scandal, and a power shift executed with kitchen implements. This film would sooner seduce an audience than instruct it, which is a preference worth respecting in an era of sermons. It is a lurid machine built to make people gasp, and it succeeds on those modest terms. The attic is the point. The lesson is optional.