The Maid is a really dumb movie but anyone who enjoys watching Sydney Sweeney will like it.
funny, romantic, or sexy in any meaningful way. Director Paul Feig basically retells a story he has already told better before. The film seems eager to be a female version of David Fincher’s Gone Girl, but it falls short.
A basic rule of writing is that your main characters need to be a little dumb mostly to explain how they get caught up in dangerous situations without finding an obvious solution in the first ten minutes. But the audience must still be able to relate to them and care.
This is especially true for horror films: who willingly enters a dark hallway, separates from friends in a dangerous area, or fails to flee immediately when confronted with a clearly threatening figure? Well, those are the characters in horror movies.
The Maid’s story is as follows: Millie is a recently released and well-groomed young woman looking for work (Sydney Sweeney, as usual, plays a poor American girl who is blonde, perfectly made-up, and conventionally attractive).
She applies to be a maid at a luxurious estate the kind of glossy American mansion you might dream of in Long Island. Her employer is Nina (Amanda Seyfried, looking like a wax figure), and from the second scene it’s clear she is, well, crazy.
Adding to the tension is Nina’s creepy ballerina daughter, who glares at Millie from the start with “I’ll kill you” looks, and the impossibly handsome husband (Brandon Sklenar), who serves as a dangerous romantic temptation. Millie continues working there, begging to stay even as the cruel treatment from her boss escalates.
Feig, known for films like Bridesmaids, Ghostbusters, and A Simple Favor, is surprisingly predictable here. It’s not the genre he is Hollywood’s go-to director for female-focused intrigue, often combining humor in his films. The most disappointing thing in The Maid is that Feig is essentially telling the same story he explored in
A Simple Favor and its follow-up last year: the rivalry and friendship between two women in the wealthy world of the U.S. One woman is “simple” and a little naive, the other a millionaire with a handsome husband and borderline murderous tendencies.
Every spiral staircase and opulent set feels like a nod to Hitchcock. Unlike The Maid, A Simple Favor was genuinely funnier and more parodic, balancing absurdity with smart thriller conventions.
For the first three-quarters of the film, The Maid is extremely dumb. Sweeney wants to leave but cannot! The woman opposite her is hysterical and gives the impression she will kill her over any minor offense.
The husband is dreamy and handsome, and Millie knows that a romance with him could unleash disaster.
There’s also a spiral staircase, and one character comments near it, “One day they’ll find my body at the bottom” and you won’t believe what happens in the end! Feig and screenwriter Rebecca Sonnenschein, who adapted a minor 2022 novel, seem to think they’ve invented foreshadowing. Of course, there are also jumpscares with characters ambushing each other and side-character conversations that conveniently provide all the backstory.
Then comes the “big twist” in the final third of the film, right where screenwriting guides say it should happen. It is predictable for anyone who has seen one or two thrillers. Everything is delivered in clumsy voice-over monologues. good news
is that in the last thirty minutes, the movie fully embraces its own dumbness, transforming into a sleazy, self-aware horror thriller that seems designed more to entertain and parody itself than to present a serious story. Feig wakes up to the material just an hour and a half too late.
The gap between the serious beginning and the over-the-top, absurd finale may be intentional. Some audience members laughed during the last minutes, so it likely worked for them more than for others. Sydney Sweeney, the “it girl” of the era, may have contributed to the audience’s engagement, though honestly she is fairly standard in the film.
She plays yet another conventionally attractive young white heroine, with cleavage repeatedly emphasized a visual hallmark since her breakout on Saturday Night Live automatically making the audience relate to her.
The Maid suffers in comparison to its obvious inspirations, including Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) and Rebecca (1940) about women suspecting or fearing a charming husband may murder them, as well as Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955) about a deadly love triangle.
The film clearly aspires to be a female Gone Girl, with the usual insights on murder and marital tension but those stories were much better written and executed.
The result is a romantic horror thriller that is not particularly scary, funny, romantic, or sexy and certainly not innovative. But Sydney Sweeney is a star, and that alone will entertain viewers who enjoy simply seeing her on screen.
