Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Housemaid.
If you’re in the mood for a twisty, high-camp thriller full of outrageous dialogue and plenty of WTF moments, look no further than The Housemaid, now in theaters.
Directed by Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, A Simple Favor) from a screenplay by Rebecca Sonnenshine (The Vampire Diaries, The Boys), the wickedly fun adaptation of Freida McFadden’s best-selling 2022 novel transports viewers to an upstate New York mansion where the wealthy and seemingly perfect Nina (Amanda Seyfried) and Andrew Winchester (Brandon Sklenar) reside with their young daughter Cecilia (Indiana Elle). But of course, their idyllic existence is a facade, as the family is harboring a dark and dangerous secret. Into this lion’s den comes Millie (Sydney Sweeney), a desperate young woman in need of work to maintain her parole status after a 10-year prison stint, who takes Nina up on her offer to be the Winchesters’ live-in housekeeper.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Knowing a simple background check would have revealed she’s a felon who was lying about everything on her resume, Millie is confused about why Nina gives her the job in the first place. Still, she moves into the Winchesters’ small attic room—suspiciously complete with a door that only locks from the outside—and begins performing her daily duties of cooking, cleaning, and caring for 7-year-old Cece. But it’s not long before Millie’s biggest concern becomes Nina herself, whose erratic behavior seems to be specifically geared toward making Millie’s life a living hell. Meanwhile, Millie can’t help but grow closer to the strikingly handsome and charming Andrew, who treats her with kindness and appears to be the ideal husband and father. During this increasingly torturous adjustment period, Millie learns Nina spent some time in a psychiatric facility years earlier after allegedly leaving Cece to drown in a bathtub and taking enough pills to kill herself. She’s told Andrew was the one who called the cops in time to rescue Cece and it’s suggested he would likely get custody of Cece if he and Nina were to get a divorce despite the fact that Cece is Nina’s child from a previous relationship.
Eventually, Millie and Andrew spend a night out together in the city that ends with them sleeping together at a hotel while Nina is away dropping Cece off at camp. When they return home, Nina, who has been tracking Millie’s location using the cell phone she gifted her, confronts them about the tryst. The fight quickly turns into an all-out blowout that ends with Andrew kicking Nina out of the house and asking Millie to move downstairs to be with him. For a short time, it seems Millie has lucked into the ultimate get out of jail free card—in some ways, quite literally.
But with over an hour to go in the movie’s runtime, it’s clear the other shoe still has to drop. And it soon does in the form of a Gone Girl-style twist that reframes everything that’s led to that moment. “What I loved about the idea of the script and the book is getting to spend a solid hour making the audience root for everything they should not be rooting for,” Feig told Den of Geek of Housemaid‘s big switch-up “And then going, ‘Okay, that’s what you wanted and are happy about? Well guess what, here’s the real story!’”
What is the twist in The Housemaid?
One morning, Millie gets up bright and early to make Andrew breakfast in bed but ends up dropping the tray of food in fright when she turns to see the Winchesters’ groundskeeper, Enzo (Michele Morrone), eerily staring at her through a window. The drop shatters a plate from Andrew’s mother’s irreplaceable collection of heirloom china and prompts Andrew to fire Enzo. Andrew then asks Millie to clean the broken pieces of the dish up and save them for him to bring to his “plate guy” before heading off to work. When he returns home that night to find the dirty pieces of plate sitting in a bag on the counter, he persuades Millie to follow him up to her old attic bedroom, where the two sleep together. You can probably guess the gist of what happens next.
When Millie wakes, she finds herself alone in the room with the door locked from the outside and Andrew informing her from the stairwell that to be let back out, she’ll need to carve 21 long and deep cuts into her stomach using a dirty shard of the plate in order to atone for the 21 pieces the dish broke into. Yep, Andrew’s a sadistic psychopath. And if you didn’t see that coming, you probably weren’t paying close enough attention.
As we learn from an ecstatic-to-be-free Nina, who finally gets to share her side of the story, Andrew was locking her in the attic room for days at a time for pretty much the entirety of their marriage to punish her for minor offenses like failing to touch up her roots. To “earn” her freedom, Nina was forced to complete painful and degrading tasks like plucking 100 hairs out of her head, follicle and all. Oh, and Andrew was also the one who drugged her to make it look as though she was trying to commit suicide and put Cece in the tub with the water running on that fateful night. Unlike in the book, in which Nina’s time in the psychiatric facility convinces her she hallucinated Andrew’s treatment of her and actually did try to kill her daughter, in the movie, Nina decides to lie and “admit” to what she did because she knows it’s the only way she’ll be allowed to return home. But by the time she’s out, she knows she can’t leave Andrew without losing Cece. So she eventually concocts a plan to make him leave her instead.
Cue the entrance of Millie, who Nina recognizes as the exact kind of woman Andrew won’t be able to resist: young, beautiful, and vulnerable. But Nina also knows something else about Millie: she’s capable of murder. We learn the crime Millie committed as a teen that landed her in prison was killing a boy at her boarding school after she walked in on him sexually assaulting her roommate. Unfortunately, no one, including Millie’s parents, believed that was actually what happened and Millie was branded a dangerous criminal.
Nina executes her plan of planting Millie in Andrew’s path and cranking the crazy dial up to push him away. But after she makes her escape and goes to pick up Cece from camp so they can make a run for it, Cece convinces her they need to go back and help Millie.
How does The Housemaid movie end?
Now, back to Millie. After resisting for as long as she can, Millie eventually caves and brutally carves the lines in her stomach before sliding the bloody piece of plate under the door as Andrew told her to. When Andrew comes in and finds her sleeping on the bed, she acts as though she understands why he had to punish her before forcefully stabbing him in the neck with a cheese knife she found in the room. Following a brief scuffle, she manages to grab Andrew’s phone and the knife and lock him inside the attic, successfully turning the tables on him. In the book, this plays out a little differently, with Millie instead pepper spraying Andrew with a can Nina left hidden in the room for her to find after Andrew forced Nina to pepper spray herself as one of her punishments.
As his own penance, Millie slides a pair of pliers under the attic door and forces Andrew to pull out his front tooth in order to ruin the perfect smile he has always used to charm women. However, when Nina returns to the house intending to free Millie from the attic prison, she unintentionally lets Andrew loose. Following a tense confrontation where Nina tells a falsely remorseful Andrew that she’d rather die than come home to him, Millie pushes Andrew over the spiral staircase banner and he falls several floors to his death. Nina and Millie agree to frame the murder as an accident that happened while Andrew was trying to change a lightbulb in the chandelier above the staircase and Millie flees the scene. In the book, Andrew simply dies of dehydration in the attic and Nina tells the cops he accidentally locked himself in the room without her knowing.
While being questioned by the police about the strange circumstances surrounding Andrew’s death, the officer conducting the investigation reveals to Nina that her sister was engaged to Andrew prior to Nina and was never the same after breaking it off with him. In the book, the cop is a man and the ex-fiancée in question is his daughter. However, in both cases, it’s implied the detective knows the truth but is choosing to look the other way knowing Andrew is a very bad man.
“There’s things that work in the book that are really satisfying, but on the big screen you always want more,” Feig told the Hollywood Reporter of the changes made to McFadden’s story. “No spoilers, but there are relationships I wanted to have a final button on and so we were able to do that.”
When Milie, who is unable to leave the state as it would violate her parole, shows up at Andrew’s funeral, Nina gives her a check for $100,000 and tells her she’s heard about a housemaid position she might be interested in. At the job interview, Millie’s would-be new employer reveals a bruise on her wrist as a not-so-subtle means of communicating that her husband has been abusing her. Millie accepts the role, indicating she understands Nina sent her to help this woman escape her violent marriage.
It’s a satisfying end all on its own. But Feig has also said there’s a chance he could move forward with adapting the other two books in The Housemaid trilogy. “If people show up [to the movie] and see it,” he told the Reporter, “I would love to see what Millie does next.”
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