Understanding the mysterious allure of ‘The Housemaid’
In a recent post on Instagram, Kleber Mendonça Filho, the director of the Oscar-nominated Brazilian film The Secret Agent, revealed that he had an unlikely Hollywood film on his mind. “There are academic texts to be considered regarding the carnal connection of the film, The Housemaid, with the Brazilian public,” he wrote. “Its success in Brazil is unusual.”
As a former film critic, Filho often shares his thoughts on recent releases, but The Housemaid is a far cry from the politically-minded, high-brow thrillers that he makes. It’s a trashy melodrama that would once have been dismissively referred to as a “women’s picture”, and despite its $35million budget, it’s more soap opera than cinema. But when it was released at the end of 2025, it became a box office sensation, not just in Brazil, but globally. To date, it’s raked in an astonishing $398m worldwide. For context, that’s more than ‘Best Picture’ winner One Battle After Another, horror sensation Weapons, and box office and critical darling Sinners. How did this happen, and why wasn’t anyone expecting it?
Directed by Paul Feig and based on the bestselling novel by Freida McFadden, The Housemaid stars Sydney Sweeney as a recently incarcerated woman living in her car who finds a job as a housemaid at a palatial mansion in the New York suburbs. Amanda Seyfried plays her employer, a seemingly sweet, bubbly housewife with a fairytale marriage to a huge hunk of a tech CEO played by Brandon Sklenar. Everything starts to unravel as Seyfried’s mental instability comes to the fore, and Sweeney finds herself falling in lust with Sklenar.
What follows is a twisty, steamy, overripe domestic thriller in which orgasms are accompanied by literal lightning strikes and mental illness takes the form of shrieking and knife-wielding. The women are dressed to the nines in couture, even though people in their income bracket would almost certainly be wearing athleisure. Meanwhile, Sklenar prowls around the house in a skin-tight tank top like a Hallmark version of Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire.
You could comfortably manoeuver a cruise ship through the plot holes, but it hardly matters. Twists come thick and fast, and the dialogue is absurd and cliched enough to lend a bit of levity to the proceedings. “I have a plate guy,” Sklenar says at one point when a character breaks a priceless heirloom. What is a plate guy? It doesn’t matter. Cut to a sex montage and another batshit revelation that turns everything on its head, and all is blissfully forgotten. This is 2016’s The Handmaiden if it had been directed by Ryan Murphy instead of Park Chan-wook.
At a time when box office juggernauts tend to either be animated kids’ movies about animals or men/superheroes driving fast and making things explode, an erotic melodrama centred on two women doesn’t seem like the most obvious moneymaker. These days, movies with mid-level budgets and female-driven storylines are released with low expectations. Some, such as the 2024 romantic comedy The Idea of You, featuring A-lister Anne Hathaway, are dumped directly onto streaming platforms despite the successes of movies like 2022’s Where the Crawdads Sing, which pulled $144million at the box office despite a scant $24m budget.
Movies geared towards women are consistently deemed unsuitable for cinema release, even when their relatively small budgets lower the bar for success. There are plenty of examples of flops in this category, of course – the Scarlett Johansson NASA rom-com Fly Me to the Moon, Sweeney’s boxing drama Christy, and Luca Guadagnino’s spectacularly smug and terrible After the Hunt, to name a few – but the same can be said of every genre. It’s clear that betting on more movies like this could be a much-needed source of cash for studios and cinemas.
The chronic underestimation of female-driven movies doesn’t fully explain the surprise success of The Housemaid, though, because its box office numbers trounce everything that’s come before it in the category. It isn’t like Sinners, which is such a thrilling, masterful work of original storytelling that everyone eventually wanted to revel in it for themselves.
In fact, The Housemaid is more likely to get Razzie nominations than break Oscar records. The dialogue is laughable, the characters defy reason, and the plot doesn’t hold up to even the most basic level of scrutiny. As Filho alluded to, however, it struck a nerve.
In the context of Brazilian audiences, the Secret Agent director posited that the film spoke to two very present national conversations – the ongoing prevalence of housemaids and the epidemic of violence against women. But are those the reasons that it has resonated with people around the world, too? It seems more likely that The Housemaid is just tapping into a pre-existing, self-evident market that any executive could see if they just paid attention to the wider media landscape, where soap operas, reality TV, and Shonda Rhimes-style scripted series dominate.
The critics among us might want to talk about The Pitt, Adolescence, and The Last of Us, but the shows that most people are watching are more in the mould of Desperate Housewives, Love Island, and Bridgerton. In Latin America, soap operas are still king. The Housemaid is simply a version of all of these categories, but dressed up in haute couture and featuring a few pricy needle drops.
It’s fun and trashy and never outstays its welcome despite being more than two hours. Crucially, Lionsgate gave it a full six weeks in cinemas before adding it to streaming, forcing audiences to the box office if they wanted to watch it. Within less than two-and-a-half weeks of its theatrical debut, the studio greenlit a sequel.
If we look back a little further for context, though, the success of The Housemaid suggests that there may be an appetite again for the erotic thrillers that were so prevalent in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Fatal Attraction was the second-highest-grossing movie of 1987 worldwide.
Basic Instinct, Indecent Proposal, and Disclosure were similarly profitable, and most of them were on par with The Housemaid in terms of clunky dialogue, outrageous storylines, and overbaked acting. Now that the Marvel Cinematic Universe seems to be dying a slow and expensive death, it would behove studios to cast their budgets in the erotic thriller direction and see what happens.
