The cinematic year has been a cracking one for horror, especially of the psychological-thriller ilk. December is ushered out with yet another corker, “The Housemaid” (Lionsgate), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse; it feels apt that this film is the subject of the final review of 2025.
A homeless, desperate, poverty-stricken young woman, who has been released from prison on parole after a sentence for murder, arrives at an oversized, locked gate (which has been embossed with a vulgar logo in the shape of the letter “W”) in seductive, snowy suburbia to interview for a position as a live-in housekeeper. “Is it too early for meat and cheese?” the interviewer, Nina Winchester, asks. “You know that’s what they have for breakfast in Europe.” She needs a housemaid as she is pregnant and thus has “not so much time to keep everything so perfect.” Shown an attic room with a dead-bolt lock on the door and a tiny, unopenable window above a spartan single bed, candidate Millie says, “It’s perfect.” Introducing her husband Andrew, a tech bro, Nina says, “You would definitely have to listen to his TED talk.” But after the interview Millie reflects that when Nina attempts to verify that the application is in order, “she will see that everything on that résumé is a total lie.”
The slick but carefully controlled turns of the plot from here are wholly premised upon the audience believing that the self-confessed liar—“I don’t even wear glasses”—has become the reliable witness. She peers at the evidence and shows us the way. Sometime the next afternoon she returns as the new hire, but the “perfect” facade has dropped. She stands stock still for a few moments and stares at both the state of the house and Nina’s upside-down behaviour. Nina’s character develops as an unpredictable, forgetful, unreliable woman whose perfectly presented female friends, whom Nina later calls “vipers,” gossip spitefully about her when she isn’t in the room. “I don’t know how he [Andrew] puts up with her,” one says, while another reveals that Nina spent nine months in a psychiatric ward. Millie’s “lurking” has verified the third side of the film’s triangle—Andrew—as stable, predictable, and honourable.
Like “Ella McCay,” which I reviewed two weeks ago, the powerful, dark hand of a tyrannical mother overhangs the main male character. Every moment she is on-screen, Andrew’s ghost-white mother sparkles—cutting through the narrative with the clear-eyed priorities of the moneyed. “This is how you allow the help to dress in your home?” she asks her daughter-in-law. And, to her son, “Oh, Andrew, where’s your tie?” (Andrew, who wears a different outfit each time he appears, always looks like he is wearing brand-new clothes.) His precisely curated upbringing is the explanation for “his need to be adored.” The inherited money is on his side of the family; Nina is left with no choice but to demand of Millie, “you’re going to need to dress appropriately around the house from now on,” giving her one week’s grace to improve. But then, five minutes later, Nina’s emotions are upended again: “You’re a lifesaver, Millie,” she says. “I don’t know what I would do without you.” When Millie finds out that Nina’s daughter CeCe, played with incredible skill by Indiana Elle, has been snooping around, she tells her, “You need to stay out of the attic.” But CeCe replies ominously: “So should you.”
One of the regrettable trends in script writing this year has been the absurd, over-aggressive way that sentences starts with the words “I need you to…” In Montrose we don’t speak this way. Imagine pausing downstairs at the Playhouse before a film and saying, “I need you to sell me a large popcorn,” or, “I need you to make me a coffee.” Perhaps it’s a Los Angeles thing. Whatever the reason, essentially excellent screenplays like that of “The Housemaid” risk being derailed: “I need you to…” “…look into tickets,” “…know that,” “…be better,” “…understand that there are consequences.”
I should pause briefly to reflect on the outstanding production design by Elizabeth Jones. The house can be thought of as a background character: its ample spaces episodically dressed—like Andrew—to beef up the mood; the attic room in one moment inviting and beautifully decorated and in the next empty and full of threat; the reception rooms “perfect” or utter carnage. But the house never loses its seamless connection with that garish logo on the front gate—a trophy of status and wealth and power concocted to prove something to the outside world. Hundreds of small details are superbly molded together for this purpose: the pretentious first-floor balcony, the extensive use of white, the “Guggenheimy” (in the style of the Guggenheim museum in New York) spiral staircases, the snake-adorned wallpaper in the bathroom, the elevated bath. One significant decision is to film the majority of the film during daylight. This differentiates the final output from commodified Netflixy movies which tend to prefer twilight, and supports the function of the attic room as a symbol of control (the method is similar in “Nuremberg,” which I reviewed in November). The editing allows just enough pause between sequences so that the audience doesn’t feel rushed. The twists are slotted elegantly into the orderly shape of the whole work. A large crowd at “The Housemaid” recently were especially appreciative of the dentally focused dark comedy (the “million-dollar smile”) towards the end.
Thank you for reading the eighty-four film reviews put out this year; thank you to my editor at the Playhouse for his ideas, encouragement, and guidance; and thank you to the team in Montrose for publishing every one of them. It will not be a surprise to discover that I chose my “Film of the Year 2025” from the crowded field of excellent horror movies. The award goes to “Presence,” which I reviewed in January: “fretful, restless, perhaps an eye that never settles, darting from place to place troubled by some experience from a previous life which is imprecise and therefore never quite understood.” Happy New Year.
Adam Poole
30th December 2025
If you are interested in viewing this screening, please book your tickets here
