Sydnet Sweeney, after months of deserved feedback from just about everyone, has finally found herself in a box office success. Though it’s hard to give her much credit as the source material almost certainly did all the heavy lifting in terms of sales. The Housemaid is a steamy thriller/mystery based on the book of the same name starring Sydney Sweeney as Millie Colloway, a new house maid working for a well to do suburban family, and Amanda Seyfried as Nina Winchester, the waspy wife who hires her.

The hiring process seems too straight forward to Millie as she is living in her car and finding it tough to make ends meet. She is hired almost immediately after faking her resume by Nina, who seems extraordinarily kind in the interview. Shortly after starting Nina’s mood takes a turn for the worst and she continuously mistreats Millie oscillating wildly in mood in front of her husband Andrew (Brandon Skelnar) and daughter Cecilia (Indiana Elle).

To dissect the film too much is to give much away. Suffice it to say that not all is as it seems in the Winchester household, but to call much of the twists and turns surprises is perhaps overselling it. The structure, plot, and message are all more than fairly straight forward in the woman led “who does who” narrative and the plodding nature of the tale is not one filled with shocks. The main selling feature of the movie is Seyfried’s performance as Nina Winchester, who balances deranged screeching and campy deliveries with ease. More reminiscent of her time on Veronica Mars than Les Misérables, and it’s exceedingly nice to see her having fun.

The same cannot be said for Sweeney’s work in the picture. While one has to admit that Sweeney has a less splashy performance to tackle, it’s still tough to see her simply seem confused or frustrated at nearly every point of the film. Especially because splashy is what Sweeney excels at. Screaming and crying and being deranged are how she got her start in the HBO series Euphoria, and then again in her self produced nun film Immaculate, she is capable of giving the kind of big broad performance a silly pulpy mystery like The Housemaid might call for.

After all is said and done all we’re left with is a poor and misguided attempt to come off as the everywoman, in a movie that doesn’t have the narrative juice to let a sleepwalking performance like that slide. It hurts her further that every other member of the cast is having some kind of campy fun with the sequences, Skelnar gets to ham it up, Seyfried blows her out of the water, and even Indiana Elle, the child actor, gets to have some off-putting (by design) scenes that set the tone of the movie. But as flawed as Sweeney’s work here is, the film is still silly enough to be a zippy, pulpy mild mess of a film.

3/5