'The Housemaid' review: Great Neck-set thriller with Sydney Sweeney, Amanda Seyfried is relatively entertaining

In “The Housemaid,” Sydney Sweeney’s Millie Calloway gets a quick tour of the Great Neck mansion where she hopes to become the live-in maid for Amanda Seyfried’s Nina Winchester. At the top of a spiral staircase straight out of Hitchcock, Nina pauses to mention her hunky yet oddly aloof husband, played by Brandon Sklenar. “Andrew says I’m totally gonna kill myself one day on these,” Nina says with a laugh. “Such a klutz!”

Some movies have no need for subtlety, and “The Housemaid” is one of them. Paul Feig’s adaptation of Freida McFadden’s bestselling novel isn’t here to break new ground, provoke any thoughts or even mildly surprise you. Instead, it has three great-looking stars, a tantalizing set-up and a twist you’ll see coming almost from the moment Millie pulls into the Winchesters’ circular driveway. “The Housemaid” is too shallow to qualify as a “psychological” thriller, and almost too predictable to even qualify as a “thriller.” Nevertheless, it’s a relatively entertaining and juicy little yarn about wealth, privilege and the horror that we like to think must lie underneath.

The casting is nicely done: Sweeney slips easily into the role of a blasé millennial, even if you don’t fully buy her as a former convict secretly on parole, while Seyfried is fun to watch as a smiling trophy wife who can suddenly become a psychotically jealous shrew. Sklenar (“It Ends with Us") turns on the charm as Andrew Winchester, a husband of seemingly infinite patience and kindness. (“He’s a hot saint,” says one of Nina’s catty friends.) Caught in the middle of the weirdness, and often conveniently forgotten by Rebecca Sonnenshine’s screenplay, is the Winchesters’ vaguely hostile daughter, Cecelia (Indiana Elle). Elizabeth Perkins is brief but effective as Andrew's ice-cold mother, Evelyn.

To say more would spoil what little there is to be spoiled. Underneath this movie’s many contrivances and logical lapses, though, is a familiar theme: The princess who wants the slipper must lose part of herself to fit it. The price of living in a castle in Great Neck (actually filmed in New Jersey) is unbearable perfectionism and isolation; the local ladies are not a supportive sisterhood but vipers in a competitive nest. Whether this makes “The Housewife” a feminist text is probably not for me to say., At any rate, similar veins have been mined in works as varied as “The Bell Jar” and “Valley of the Dolls,” so why shouldn’t “The Housemaid” have its say?

On the way to its bloody finale, “The Housemaid” telegraphs every punch, foreshadows every twist and signals every turn. There’s something almost comforting about it, like a bedtime story you’ve been told a thousand times. True, the whole things falls apart the more you think about it, but that’s easily fixed: Don’t think about it.

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com