Marketing materials of massive cardboard cutouts, standees, and magnified posters are a staple in cinemas in major Philippine urban areas. You see kids and their parents pose at the Spongebob movie “environmental graphic.”
Recently, I saw a young lady direct her male companion to take a picture of her at the standee of the movie The Housemaid (2025, directed by Paul Feig). The young lady whipped out her Kindle from her bag and showed the book cover of the 2022 bestselling psychological thriller written by Freida McFadden, from which this movie is adapted.
Deception is delicious in cinema, especially when it is well done in upending certain expectations, like this movie. The Housemaid does this by leaning heavily on the misogynist tropes of white women unhinged and the beleaguered but hot husband.
We have seen this before: The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992, directed by Curtis Hanson), Single White Female (1992, directed by Barbet Schroeder), and other thrillers that had a stranger enter the house to wreak havoc. The stranger seduces the husband and all that jazz. But this is where the similarity ends.
The Housemaid asks you to be patient for its satisfying and macabre payoff because it really pushes these tired tropes on their head. It may be mostly about one woman fighting another, but this is a placeholder for who the real enemy is: patriarchy and its stringent hold over women’s bodies through expectation and deception.
Amanda Seyfried is perfect in this role as a mix of Stepford Wives and Psycho. Sydney Sweeney can stand against the powerhouse that is Seyfried. Sweeney is an uneven actress who was strong and compelling in Immaculate (2024, directed by Michael Mohan) but has been relegated to curves for gratuitous body shots of marketability, like in The Housemaid. Yet, as this movie progresses, she can snarl as mightily as Seyfried.
If there is an underlying theme in this movie, it is how much women’s bodies are subject to violence and how women’s minds are subject to gaslighting. These are actual horrors faced daily by women. Yet, in this movie, it asks the questions, “What is privilege? What is a right?”
Control is an aphrodisiac, yes. Hell, some even find suffocation kinky. These are all traces of a flesh which, if you think about it, quivers the same, be it through pleasure or pain. The
Housemaid offers both in spades. In fact, the ultimate kink here is recovery. I mean, the movie is great enough for a reader and fan, an adult nonetheless, of the book to actually take the time to pose next to its standee.
