The Housemaid: Freida McFadden’s gory bestseller is made all the more disturbing by its on-screen adaptation

This piece contains spoilers for The Housemaid. 

There’s always a buzz around a bestselling book adaptation when it comes to the big screen. Chloe Zhao’s take on Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet is already landing award nominations, and we’re all still recovering from that first trailer for Emerald Fennell’s erotic reimagining of Wuthering Heights. But, before all of that, Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) has adapted Freida McFadden’s global sensation The Housemaid as an early Christmas present for us all. 

Readers devoured the novel that became a BookTok phenomenon as it delivered the perfect recipe of misdirection, secrets and suspense that every good thriller needs to satisfy an audience’s appetite. It handles topics of abuse, coercion and control in relationships in a chilling yet entirely believable way.  

The Housemaid follows Millie (Sydney Sweeney), a down-on-her-luck 28-year-old, who lands the opportunity of a lifetime as she interviews to become a live-in housemaid for an affluent family, the Winchesters, just outside of New York. 

Everything about the family screams perfection: wealth, stability and domestic bliss. Bathed in white, Nina (Amanda Seyfried) is the embodiment of a well-kept suburban housewife (bouncy blonde blow-out and all) with a patient and handsome husband, Andrew, and a seemingly sweet daughter, Cecilia. But, as is so often the case, nothing is ever as it seems.

Shrouded in her own secrets, Millie starts to become more suspicious of the family she now lives above in their cramped attic. Nina’s moods become more erratic, and rumours swirl about her history of mental illness and a psychotic breakdown that nearly resulted in drowning her own child. 

With each passing day, Millie becomes more paranoid about the true nature of this picture-perfect life, while still desperate to hold onto her position, regardless of how cruel, jealous and unstable Nina becomes. 

For the most part, The Housemaid is a faithful adaptation that honours its source material. Lines of dialogue have been drawn directly from the book, breathing life into McFadden’s words in the chilling, captivating and often humorous manner that they were intended. 

However, the stakes are much higher here. Amplified by gore, shock and betrayal, the dramatic beats have been heightened (and in some instances completely rewritten) to sustain the tension and surprise throughout – even for keen fans of the book. 

Some readers questioned the casting choices. Nina, in particular, is described as a curvy woman in the book, which becomes more relevant as she begins to self-sabotage her life and her body to escape her seemingly perfect life through binge eating at night, and some psychological depth is lost by removing this element. On the other hand, it avoids leaning into the outdated stereotype that a woman who is curvy must have ‘let herself go’, so perhaps we’ll let them off.

In other ways, however, Seyfried is the absolute embodiment of Nina, flitting between self-deprecating sweetness and gratitude towards Millie to annihilating her surroundings in a frenzied rage and panic. She humanises the scope of Nina’s supposed psychosis that the entire plot hinges on and demonstrates the impressive breadth of her ability as an actor. 

Naturally, The Housemaid only works if Nina and Millie’s performance as frenemies is compelling, and alongside the steadfast stability of Andrew’s polite and loving demeanour, the trio carry that dynamic well, drawing out the power play and layers of that fractured and ever-changing relationship, even if some of that love triangle feels rushed. 

Details about Millie’s past are also drip-fed in a more satisfying way than in the book: the nature of her former life slowly unravels, as opposed to one big reveal early on in the book. The impact of each of her secrets (and subsequent lies) only makes the final turn of fate all the more gratifying as a viewer, as we finally become privy to all of the information that one character held all along. 

It’s only when the final act begins that the biggest deviations from the plot take place. The ending has been changed to increase the nail-biting tension, which I won’t spoil here, but it’s a worthwhile change for the screen. As shocking as the ending is in the book, it plays out in a slow, drawn-out way, while the film ends with an immediate and particularly gruesome punch. 

Thrillers thrive on a swift pace, as bombshells are strategically dropped to cause as much chaos and carnage as possible. One downside of the non-stop pace is that The Housemaid removes some of the more mundane scenes that allow the stakes to gradually escalate in the book. 

The final act is more gruesome than the book, too, as it reveals the depths of the horrors that lie beneath this vision of domestic perfection. More enduring forms of torture are swapped out for ones that hold the most visual impact to consolidate the scope of the danger that Millie is in at the Winchesters. 

Feig also manages to recreate the impressive (if somewhat predictable) rug-pull moments from the book that reimagine how the sequence of events in the story could be interpreted completely differently. It’s a clever and difficult feat to achieve, but it’s executed in a way that feels believable, mostly as a result of Seyfried’s bewitching performance. 

Naturally, not everything from the page can be covered in the same depth on screen, but the biggest absence from the book is Enzo’s backstory. The Italian groundskeeper is still on hand to offer silent, brooding support, but most of his pivotal relationships with other characters have been cut to sustain the focus on the main love triangle. 

It’s always difficult to please everyone when it comes to adapting a cherished book (when we all have an idea of how that world and those people will look), but The Housemaid is an entertaining watch that will leave you on the edge of your seat and cowering behind your hands until the last moment. It’s a satisfying adaptation that delivers the chills, surprises and horrors that psychological thrillers that explore themes of coercion and control need. 

The Housemaid is released in cinemas on Boxing Day. 

Images: Lionsgate