The Housemaid Review (2025)
Director: Paul Feig
Writer: Rebecca Sonnenshine (based on the novel by Freida McFadden)
Starring: Sydney Sweeney, Amanda Seyfried, Brandon Sklenar, Michele Morrone, Elizabeth Perkins
Release Date: December 19, 2025 (now streaming on Starz)
Runtime: 2 hours 11 minutes

The Housemaid has been on my radar for a while and since it’s now streaming on Starz, I was finally able to sit down and give it a watch. Going in I knew only two things: Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried were in it, and that it was a thriller. That was enough for me. Well, Sweeney was enough, but it looked interesting.

I like both Sydney and Amanda, but for different reasons. Amanda Seyfried I think is a genuinely good actress and she isn’t hard to look at either. Sydney, I am more of a fan of on a personality level than as an actress (ok, I’ll be honest, it’s because she’s super hot). She has an obvious screen presence, but the acting itself has always been a little inconsistent for me. I’d say Sydney is decent, but getting better. With those expectations set, The Housemaid delivered more than I anticipated from both of them.

Millie Calloway (Sweeney) is a young woman trying to get back on her feet who lands a live-in housemaid position with the wealthy Winchester family out on Long Island. Nina Winchester (Seyfried) is warm and welcoming. The house is beautiful and massive. The pay is good. And her husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) had me saying to myself within the first twenty minutes that this guy is so full of shit. Everything about him from the too-smooth charm, the way he moves around Millie, the convenient backstory just screamed bad guy. And he is. That part I saw coming from the jump.

What I didn’t see coming was where it actually went. I had settled on my own theory early; I figured Andrew and Nina were both going to turn out to be some kind of twisted couple with bad intentions for Millie, the kind of setup you have seen in thrillers like this before. The film goes somewhere different and more interesting than that, and the third act caught me off guard. That is harder to pull off than it sounds when your audience has already pegged the villain before the first act is over.

Amanda Seyfried gives the best performance in this movie, and it isn’t particularly close. Also not really surprising. She is doing something layered with Nina, a character who reads one way for most of the film and reveals herself to be something else entirely. Amanda committed to it completely. There is a scene in the back half where she fully lets the mask drop and it is one of the better individual scenes I have watched in a thriller in a while. The woman is just a damn good actress.

Sweeney is better than I expected. The role asks a lot of her in the third act physically and emotionally and she rises to it. She is not going to win any awards for this one but she holds the film as its center of gravity and does the job. Brandon Sklenar as Andrew is exactly what the film needs him to be: charming and oily in equal measure, the kind of guy you know is lying even when you can’t prove it yet.

Paul Feig deserves credit here too. This isn’t the kind of film you usually associate with him (he made his name on comedies like Bridesmaids, which was good, and the terrible Ghostbusters reboot) but he handles the thriller material with a steady, confident hand. The cinematography keeps things visually elegant throughout; the Winchester estate looks like money in every shot, and Feig uses that pristine, expensive setting to create a subtle unease that runs underneath the whole film. Something that looks this good shouldn’t feel as threatening, and that tension between beauty and danger is one of the things the film does best.

This is one of those films with rather high rewatchability (and not because of the Sweeney twins). When you know where everything is going, a second viewing plays completely different and allows you to notice things you might’ve overlooked initially, and I am already looking forward to watching it again sometime soon. Details seeded in the first half will hit differently once you have the full picture. That is always the sign of a well-constructed thriller.

It does run a bit long, and the middle stretch tests your patience slightly because it’s just a tad slow. But the performances are strong across the board, the twist earns its reveal, and the whole thing is just a thoroughly enjoyable watch. A damn good thriller.

For my fellow physical media fans, this one is definitely worth grabbing on 4K Bluray, which you should totally grab from Amazon.

The Housemaid gets a four out of five: COMMENDABLE.

TITAN’S DECREE:

If you enjoy this one, you might also like to check out my review of The Glass House or Joy Ride, both strong thrillers. Or click here to check out more movie reviews.

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