“Camp is art that proposes itself seriously but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much’,” reads the oft-quoted 1964 Susan Sontag essay, Notes on “Camp”. Today, so much of what is intended to be “camp” lacks that necessary seriousness. But Paul Feig gets it. He’s quietly become one of our most reliable exponents of the art.
With the Blake Lively comedy-thriller A Simple Favor (2018), and this year’s sequel, the director’s revived the idea of “women’s pictures” – once the playground of Douglas Sirk and George Cukor – for the TikTok era. With The Housemaid, he takes one of these online sensations, Freida McFadden’s 2022 bestseller, and carefully teases out its profoundly silly twist. Victims of violence and misogyny are here treated with dignity, yet it still feels, as Sontag would describe, “extravagant” enough in its execution to be moreish. The Housemaid isn’t a particularly great film. But it is camp.
Rebecca Sonnenshine’s script is a fairly close translation of the novel, with a little Hollywood flair tacked onto the end. Millie Calloway (Sydney Sweeney) drives up to a Long Island estate, decorated in what would be a wellness influencer’s idea of eclectic, and interviews for the role of live-in housemaid to Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried), her tech CEO husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar), and their sullen ballerina daughter, Cecelia (Indiana Elle).
Nina offers pleasant small talk over tea and a charcuterie board, before Millie slinks off to sleep in her car overnight. She’s not told her would-be employer the whole truth. But when Nina offers her the job, and shows her around her new quarters, the fact the door locks from the outside and is covered in scratches suggests Nina isn’t entirely being truthful either. “What kind of monsters are we?” she retorts, with a little too much bounce in her laugh.
Cue the emotional abuse. Millie wanders downstairs in the morning to find Nina tearing at drawers and launching groceries across the kitchen counter, convinced her new employee has thrown out her handwritten PTA speech; Mille receives terse instruction to pick up Cecelia from ballet class, only to arrive and be told she’s staying at a friend’s overnight. Men skulk at the sidelines: Enzo (Michele Morrone), the groundskeeper, appears suddenly in windows and doorways, while Andrew offers half-lidded, sympathetic looks that Millie inevitably finds herself attracted to.
McFadden’s logic feels paper thin, so Feig instead deftly pulls our attention away from the details and towards the larger theme of hypocrisy around women’s mental health. Nina’s friends are all too eager to disclose her trauma like it’s an amuse-bouche bit of gossip. It’d be too generous to frame The Housemaid as actively Hitchcockian, but it does feel as if it’s been made by someone who at least has Rebecca (1940) and Vertigo (1958) rattling around in the back of their head.
A thunderstorm provides a bit of pathetic fallacy, while the way cinematographer John Schwartzman uses moonlight to halo the blonde tresses of its female leads feels a step above the usual flat, made-for-streaming look we’d expect from this brand of adaptation.
Sweeney’s trademark disaffection, for the most part, works for a character who’s constantly on the offensive. But Seyfried’s the real secret weapon here. She’s quite brilliant, shifting so imperceptibly between mean girl, bunny boiler, and sympathetic sufferer that we’re constantly kept on our toes when it comes to whether she’s playing up to the cinematic trope of the mad woman or turning it on its head. And that’s camp.
Dir: Paul Feig. Starring: Sydney Sweeney, Amanda Seyfried, Brandon Sklenar, Michele Morrone, Elizabeth Perkins. Cert 15, 131 minutes.
‘The Housemaid’ is in cinemas from 26 December
