Based on the bestselling novel by Freida McFadden and directed expertly by Paul Feig, The Housemaid is a promising sign for the multiplex – a return to what was once called the mid-budget adult thriller; films that don’t rely on special effects or especially high production values but get the job done admirably with great characters, great plotting and an infectious sense of mood and atmosphere. It revolves around two women – Millie, played by Sydney Sweeney, who is in desperate search of work, and Nina, played by Amanda Seyfried, who employs her as a maid in her enormous mansion in Great Neck, Long Island. During the interview, Nina is all sunshine and roses, but as soon as Millie accepts the job, she starts to see a very different side to her employer, and to wonder about her relationship with her husband Andrew, played by Brandon Sklenar, her daughter Cece, played by Indiana Elle, and her mother-in-law Evelyn, played by Elizabeth Perkins, who steals the show in her brief appearances, and must surely play a role in the sequel that Feig will also be directing.

Like so many mid-budget thrillers, the house is a major character here, reflecting an older sense of the multiplex as a surrogate home, a place where regular people could vicariously experience bourgeois sumptuousness. Like a Nancy Meyers tableau turned awry, Nina greets Millie, at the job interview, with a lavish charcuterie board and gives her a tour of the house, which was designed by her husband, who “pays incredible attention to detail.” Every aspect of this enormous structure either allegorises its own narrative centrality, such as the miniature replica of the house in Cece’s bedroom, or brims with narrative potentiality. When showing Millie the elaborate spiral staircase, Nina makes a joke about falling down and leaving a body outline at the bottom; when she escorts her to her bedroom in the attic, she assures her that she can blast loud music and not be audible at the bottom of the stairs.

With that house to anchor her, the first act of the film is driven by a sublimely maximalist performance from Seyfried, who is clearly enjoying the role, and at time approaches the inane, contagious, enthusiastic, campy big-screen energy of Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls. The first great twist of the film is that Nina’s manic hospitality, present in the job interview, quickly gives way to (what appears to be) flamboyant psychosis, causing her to destroy whole rooms in temper tantrums, make insane accusations that Millie is attempting to undermine her, and issue forth demands that cannot possibly be fulfilled or even comprehended, all while her husband watches in stoic silence, forming an unspoken rapport, and then a romantic attachment, to the new housemaid. Seyfried’s role is delightfully driven by sudden entrances and appearances – she is always coming onstage, whether literally, by bursting through doors and hallways, or through tricks of the camera, as when Millie closes a mirrored cabinet to reveal her watching, or the camera pivots to disclose her just off frame. Her abrupt, frenzied text messages form another kind of entrance, while her rapid tone shifts, in which she moves from friendly to hostile in a split second, are effectively re-entrances, recalibrations of the scene in question. All of this means that a great deal of the camp pleasure of the first act stems from waiting to see how Seyfried will arrive next. There’s something of the slasher to the inevitability that she will show up in some unexpected a way – it’s simply a question of when, and how creatively.

On the face of it, then, we have a dichotomy between two women – one a sane victim and the other a psychotic aggressor. But the film elegantly collapses them into the same carceral state, while providing each of them with a way to traverse mere victimhood too. We learn fairly on that Millie is on parole after killing a man who was attempting to rape her best friend, meaning that her job prospects are limited and she is completely dependent on Nina’s employment to avoid survival – that is, tied to her job for basic amenities in the same way as most Americans. Nina finds this out early on and uses it to her advantage, progressively stripping back Millie’s rights until she’s closer to an indentured servant than to a regular employee, continually suffering abject indignity to avoid returning to prison.The more remarkable twist is that Nina’s “insanity” is a complete act, designed to achieve two very specific purposes. First, she wants to drive Millie into her husband’s arms, so that he loses interest in her and leaves the relationship voluntarily. Second, she wants to appear “crazy” enough that her husband and Millie don’t enquire after her once she has been expelled. For Nina’s story is remarkably similar to Millie’s, in some respects – she was in an economically precarious situation, was taken in by Andrew’s apparent generosity, only to find herself in a coercively controlled relationship that left her with no personal autonomy.

In other words, Millie’s victimhood at the hands of the justice system (the jury didn’t buy that her actions were about defending her friend) and Nina’s victimhood at the hands of her marriage converge into a kind of heteropessimism – a vision of heterosexual marriage as a carceral state in and of itself (it’s notable that neither woman ends up in a relationship, let alone married, at the end). For a mid-budget multiplex release, that’s a pretty provocative prospect, and turns The Housemaid into a modern descendent of Gaslight, in which Nina responds to Andrew’s insistence on her “craziness” by playing the role so perfectly that he voluntary gives her up. Amazingly, this doesn’t make the film moralistically expository but more enjoyable,just as Seyfried’s performance in the first act is even more addictive once we know that Nina herself was performing. In fact, the film becomes funnier once Rebecca Sonnenshine’s screenplay starts to dismantles the bland hot guy of regular romance. Andrew is “a knight in shining armour,” who wants lots of kids and admits that “All I’ve ever wanted to do is be a husband and father.” But Andrew is also a lurid emblem of the perverted rituals of the ultra-rich, whose pet perversion is locking up Nina, and then Millie, in the attic bedroom when they don’t comply. Some of these scenes are truly shocking, as when Andrew forces Nina to carve “twenty long deep cuts” into her stomach before he’ll let her out. But they’re also absurd, divesting him of any residual rakish pathos, as when he devolves into hysteria at Nina smashing his family’s china set, or when he goes so far as to frame Millie for the murder of her own child simply because she allows her roots to show.

In an incredible ending, Nina and Millie both realise that Andrew’s weak spot is his need to be adored, and play to it brilliantly. Far from trying to fix him, or redeem him, they use his own worst instincts against him, before Nina heads to California, but not without giving some of Andrew’s estate to Millie and – this is the brilliant flourish of the film – giving her a reference to another local woman, whose brutal husband means that she also requires Millie’s very particular set of skills. And the achievement of The Housemaid is that it can address serious issues of gender and class in American culture (“It’s amazing what you’ll exchange for childcare and health insurance”) while never descending to expository preachiness, instead opting for an addictive inane energy all the way throughout (the pivotal twist comes when Nina switches from manic crying to manic laughing upon finally escaping her husband’s grasp) and then wrap it all up in a provocative and campy franchise proposal: Millie as housemaid revenge-o-matic, such an instantly amazing premise that, with viewership skyrocketing, the sequel was announced within days of cinematic release.