"For the majority of The Housemaid, it's pretty clear that something's off with the picture-perfect family of the Winchesters. When Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried) hires the desperate Millie Calloway (Sydney Sweeney) to be her housemaid, she seems sweet and normal, if a little airheaded. Pregnancy hormones, she reveals conspiratorially to Millie. But don't tell her husband, she wants it to be a surprise ..."
"However, when Millie arrives the next day to clean the Winchesters' gorgeous, modern house, she finds it a mess. Nina greets her hurriedly, her airheaded nature now appearing to have fully graduated to erratic. And when Nina's husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) and young daughter Cecelia (Indiana Elle) arrive home a little later, they both seem clueless as to why Millie's there."
"Thus begins the twisted tale of The Housemaid, based on the 2022 novel of the same name by Freida McFadden. The New York Times bestseller was a huge hit in the vein of the post-Gone Girl thriller, thanks to a shocking twist hidden in its latter half. But director Paul Feig, who had honed a skill for campy melodrama with his A Simple Favor movies, wanted to still retain that "rug pull" for movie audiences. "You just have to misdirect the audience majorly," Feig tells Inverse."
A seemingly perfect family hires a desperate housemaid, but the wife's erratic behavior and the household's confusion reveal deeper imbalance. The story adapts a 2022 Freida McFadden novel that built momentum as a post-Gone Girl thriller with a concealed late twist. Director Paul Feig leaned into misdirection and campy melodrama while preserving the story's rug-pull payoff for audiences. Test screenings generated strong reactions, with viewers cheering then being surprised when expectations were overturned. The film relies heavily on Amanda Seyfried and Sydney Sweeney's performances and a calibrated mix of comedy and drama to make the twist effective.
Read at Inverse
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