At first, The Housemaid wants you comfortable. It gives you a familiar setup: a beautiful house on Long Island, a rich couple with something slightly off, and a woman who needs a job badly enough to ignore her instincts. The wife is unstable, the husband gentle, and the help watches quietly as the marriage rots from the inside out.
Millie Calloway (Sydney Sweeney) arrives with nothing but a duffel bag and a criminal record, the latter of which she lies about just enough to be hired anyway. Her room is in the attic and locks from the outside. That detail lands lightly at first, like an architectural quirk, but it never quite leaves your peripheral vision.
Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried), the woman of the house, behaves badly in a way that feels both theatrical and strategic. She throws fits. She breaks things. She gaslights Millie with the confidence of someone who knows the help will never be believed. Andrew, her husband, appears as the counterweight: composed, attentive, faintly burdened by the task of loving a difficult woman. The movie encourages you to diagnose Nina, to slot her into the familiar lineage of “crazy wives.” We’re told she once harmed her child. Andrew, we learn, saved them both.
By now, you think you know where this is going.
Eventually, the movie does what movies like this always do: it sends everyone to New York City and pretends that counts as romance. Andrew takes Millie out for the night while Nina is away dropping Cece at camp. Dinner turns into drinks, drinks turn into a hotel room, and by morning they’ve crossed the line the movie has been nudging toward since Millie first noticed Andrew noticing her.
Naturally, Nina already knows. The phone she gave Millie—previously framed as a thoughtful gesture—reveals itself as a surveillance device, and she confronts them the second she walks back into the house. Andrew, suddenly decisive in the way men often are when choosing between two women, kicks Nina out of the house and invites Millie to move downstairs, effectively upgrading her from staff to girlfriend.
Then, in a very Gone Girl way, the floor drops out.
Nina isn’t unstable; she’s surviving. Her erratic behavior is the residue of sustained psychological abuse, carefully engineered by Andrew to make her appear unreliable to outsiders. He has built a system in which control masquerades as care and punishment dresses itself up as concern. Nina hired Millie deliberately, knowing exactly the kind of woman Andrew would target: young, vulnerable, isolated, and already primed to doubt her own credibility. What looks like madness is strategy—a woman setting a trap without getting herself killed.
Back at the mansion, a post-coital Millie drops a piece of Andrew’s mother’s china, and it shatters into 21 pieces. He coaxes Millie back upstairs to her old attic bedroom under the guise of sex, locks her in, and orders her to cut her stomach with a broken piece of china 21 times, because “actions have consequences.”
Nina, newly liberated and almost giddy with it, finally gets to explain how all of this works. Andrew locked her in that very attic for days at a time throughout their marriage, as punishment for offenses so minor they barely register as grievances. Her punishment for missing her hair appointment? Pull out 100 hairs, follicle intact.
It gets worse. Andrew was the one who drugged Nina and staged the night Cece nearly drowned, placing the child in the bathtub to make it look like Nina had snapped. In the film, Nina never believes she tried to kill her daughter. She lies and accepts institutionalization because she understands the rules: compliance is the only way back into the house, and the only way to stay near her child. By the time she’s released, she knows she can’t leave Andrew without losing Cece. So she begins planning how to make him leave first.
The film finally fills in the blank of Millie’s past. As a teenager at a boarding school, she killed a boy after walking in on him sexually assaulting her roommate. No one believed her version of events—not the school, not the authorities, not even her parents—and Millie was flattened into the “unstable girl.”
With that knowledge in hand, Nina moves forward. She hires Millie deliberately, slots her into the house, and then begins turning up the volume on her own instability, performing madness with the express goal of making Andrew look elsewhere. It’s bait and misdirection, executed with the patience of someone who has learned to survive by improvising inside other people’s expectations.
The plan almost works, until Cece insists on saving Millie.
Trapped in the attic, Millie eventually does what Andrew demands. She carves the cuts into her stomach and slides the blood-smeared shard under the door. When Andrew comes in and finds her sleeping, she pretends to understand why he had to punish her. Then she stabs him in the neck with a cheese knife she found in the room. After a brief struggle, she locks him inside the attic instead, sealing him into the space he’s used as a private correctional facility.
With Andrew now on the wrong side of the door, Millie decides he should earn his freedom the way everyone else has. She slides a pair of pliers under the door and orders him to pull out one of his front teeth. The smile he’s used to disarm, seduce, and control is finally damaged, permanently.
Then Nina returns, intending to rescue Millie, and in a grim twist of timing, accidentally lets Andrew loose. What follows is the last confrontation: Andrew pleading, apologizing, performing remorse with the ease of someone who has rehearsed it. Nina listens, unmoved, and tells him plainly that she would rather die than come back to him.
Millie pushes Andrew over the banister of the spiral staircase, sending him crashing down several stories to his death. The two women make a quick, pragmatic decision to frame the fall as an accident—a man changing a lightbulb in a chandelier, slipping, misjudging gravity—and Millie disappears before the authorities arrive. In the novel, Andrew’s end is quieter and crueler, a slow death by dehydration in the attic, but the movie opts for something more immediate.
During questioning, an officer lets slip that Andrew had a previous fiancée who was never the same after leaving him. It was the cop’s sister. In the novel, it’s the cop’s daughter. Either way, the implication is clear: the truth is known, and deliberately ignored.
Millie’s parole keeps her from leaving the state, and when she meets Nina at Andrew’s funeral, she receives a check for $100,000 and a tip for another housemaid job. At the interview, Millie clocks a bruise on the wrist of the woman across from her. No explanation follows, and Millie accepts the job without hesitation. Millie understands why she’s been sent there and what she’s meant to do. The housemaid moves on, carrying experience, rage, and a very particular set of skills into the next beautiful home with locked doors and men who think they’re untouchable.
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