KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. More than a few sick days for ol' Kent this week, and usually that means curling up on the couch and just gorging on a diet of cold & flu Tylenols and, of course, movies. But the pain on my brain from sinus pressure was so debilitating for one of those days that I could barely leave my bed and just could *not* look at a screen. Here's what little I got up to...
This Week:
The Housemaid (2025, d. Paul Feig - Crave)
Universal Language (2024, d. Matthew Rankin - Crave)
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I was warned in advance that The Housemaid was trash cinema, but a couple of reviewers had deemed it highest quality of trash cinema and it's hit some early best-of-2026-so-far lists, and, hey I *generally* like Paul Feig's movies, including A Simple Favor (not enough to review it, or watch the sequel, apparently...that link is to Toasty's review) so I thought, I'm trapped in bed with nothing else to do ...why not.
Millie (Sydney Sweeney) arrives as the Winchester estate on Long Island for an interview to be their new live-in housemaid (and occasional nanny). The place is pristine. Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried) greets her, shows her around the house, including the attic bedroom she would stay in, details the job, and both seem to feel pretty good about the exchange. And then we see Millie back in her car, where she lives, taking hobo-baths in gas station washrooms. We eventually learn she is out on parole and she needs a steady job and place to live, or back in the slammer she goes for another five years.
After a couple days, just when she thinks she isn't getting the job, Nina calls and needs her immediately. In the days since, the pristine abode Millie first saw is now a fucking calamity. So disastrous that it seems kind of impossible. Millie gets to work. She has the place restored to near perfection when Nina's husband, Andrew (Brandon Sklenar), and her daughter Cece come home. Cece, in a near Damien-from-The-Omen deadpan tells her shoes are not allowed on the furniture.
The next morning Millie, having slept in a bed for the first time in ages, wakes up late, and rushes downstairs to find Nina in the midst of a complete meltdown. The place is trashed and Nina accuses Millie of tossing out a speech she had written. Andrew steps in and, like he's had to do this many times before, calms Nina down, kisses her passionately and carries her away, but not without looking at Millie apologetically first. It's just the first of Nina's micro- and macro-aggressions towards her, including canceling her Saturday off to run chores, then calling and asking Millie to pick up Cece from dance class, only not telling her where dance class is before hanging up, and when Millie arrives, another mom notes to Millie that Cece is sleeping over at her house and she calls Nina to confirm and disses Millie to. her. face.
Millie doesn't understand why Nina is fucking with her until a peek in her medicine cabinet reveals prescription drugs for treating psychosis. Later she overhears other mothers, at tea, talking about what a saint Andrew is (not to mention so sexy with a million-dollar-smile) for taking Nina and her daughter in, and learns from another nanny about how Nina tried to drown Cece and kill herself with sleeping pills. As Nina continues to harass Millie, Andrew needs to come to Millie's defence more and more... and Millie starts having nighttime fantasies about Andrew.
All of this is just the literal set-up. If it feels like Millie's being set-up, she is. But why. Why is Nina fucking with her so badly? It seems so...intentional, not just erratic thinking of a mentally unstable person.
And that's the twist of the movie.
Where it seemed so obvious where this movie was going to start - Millie would have an affair with Andrew and Nina would make her life hell for it - the timing was wrong. This is a 131-minute film. From the moment Millie arrived on her first day of work, everything was awry and Nina started fucking with her immediately. A movie would usually build to such events and give us some explanation as to why they were happening. But here, we're left to wonder throughout the prolonged first act, is Millie's criminal past part of it? What about Nina's past?
And then there's Cece, whose need for control and perfection are downright creepy. But then we meet Andrew's mother (Elizabeth Perkins), whose every comment is something disparaging, nothing living up to her standards. The hints are there...is Andrew the problem?
The first act spans the first hour, and then it takes off when Millie and Andrew fuuuck. She's been in prison for 10 years and he's a big, handsome beefcake with a white knight complex...it was bound to happen. Nina finds out, like, immediately, and goes after Millie, but Andrew comes to her defence and tosses Nina out. And soon all the secrets start to unfurl, all the clues come together and the whole thing comes into focus.
Without spoiling too much other than what I've already spoiled, it gets dark, abusive and demented. Then there's a pivot where the abuse is still demented but not so dark. And the finale which ties things up in a nice little bow.
Except the bow is made of horseshit, such that spending more than 30 seconds thinking about not just the ending, (or worse, the franchise set-up) and the whole thing makes less and less sense. It's a trashy story that's barely held together with popsicle sticks and Elmer's glue.
What Feig brings to the trash is a steady hand and a lens for wish fulfillment. There aren't many male directors who understand the feminine gaze like Feig. If this were an 1980's thriller, the sex scenes would be luridly all about Sydney Sweeney's naked body, but Feig knows that what's important to this film's audience is the setting, the mood, the touching, the contact. In the non-sex scenes he lovingly captures the idyllic Winchester house, he get's Millie's POV that even amidst all the hardship she faces from Nina, there's still something she desires about this place. He gets that as much as a naked Brandan Sklenar is of interest to his audience, Sklenar wearing a white tank-top and showing his muscles put to use picking a weeping Amanda Seyfried up off the floor is even sexier. Feig makes a good-looking picture, and makes good-looking people look good in his good-looking picture.
I am not on the Sidney Sweeney train. She's not a bad actor, but she's not a tremendously versatile one either. I've never been wowed. Sure, she has curves (paging Dr. Wenowdis) but her dead eyes counteract the allure. Maybe in time she will develop from it-girl to prestige performer like a certain K-Stew I really used to dislike and now have tremendous respect for. That Sweeney is taking ownership of her films, nailing those executive producer credits, and no doubt having full control over how much of herself she wants to show and how she wants to show it does relay that she has some idea of what she's doing, at least on a business end.
Seyfried is quite good here, but only as good as the script will allow her to be. It's within her ability to put Nina into performance mode, and relay to the audience that that is what she is doing, but it would betray the twist of the story for her to do so, and so she's stuck playing Nina as, basically, two different characters. The Nina of the first half who we have to hate, and the Nina of the second half who we need to sympathize with.
The Housemaid is not a bad time, if it's your sort of thing, but it's not really my thing and I was left just kind of annoyed with it.
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I am by no means a Maddin expert, so comparing this work against Maddin's filmography is a bit beyond my grasp, but just to point out that Universal Language does feature a character named Matthew Rankin (played by Rankin) who is returning to his hometown of Winnipeg to visit his mother. The story, toying with ideas of identity, community, and reality, also presents itself in a non-linear narrative, and the world in which it takes place is not unfamiliar, but is definitely an alternate reality to our own. Rankin does not share Maddin's fixation with early cinema, he does, like Maddin, have a fascination with branding and advertising and the way in which products penetrate our lives.
The Winnipeg and Canada of Universal Language finds Persian and French as the national languages (no English words are spoken or seen). The Riel is the currency of this version of Canada (with Louis Riel's image stamped upon it), and the Quebecois of the film seem to have real difficult understanding the landscape of Canada outside their own borders... sovereignty is still a fixation.
The patient pacing of Rankin's film is immediate from the first frame, a frame which holds for over three full minutes. It is of the exterior of a school. The entrance in the middle left of frame, the window into as classroom in the upper right. The bricks and windows and eaves create width across the frame and make for their own frames. The class, as viewed through the window, is fully chaotic, unruly. A man carries his luggage in a hurried gait across the frame, up the stairs, into the entrance in the middle left, appearing again as a he enters a doorway visible through the window in the upper right. He scolds his class mercilessly. He's not a fan of their behaviour. And as he berates them, a child enters the lower left of the frame, up the stairs and into the entrance before it cuts to the interior.
Rankin uses this minimalist technique throughout the film, a static shot, precisely framed, often using brick or cement architecture to create depth and space within the scene. The camera doesn't move, instead it becomes all about the movement within the camera. It's spectacular to watch, to marvel at the precision of the movement and the eye that understands what to keep in and what to leave out of the shot.
The story, as it were, not only finds Matthew returning to Winnipeg to visit his mother, but two young sisters, Negin and Nazgol, who discover a 500 Riel note frozen in ice on the sidewalk and seek a means to retrieve it, as well as Massoud (Pirouz Nemati, also the film's co-screenwriter alongside Rankin and Ila Firouzabadi) who leads a dubious tourist group through mundane highlights of the city.
There are sub-plots (well, "plots" might be a bit much) about turkeys of the wild and pageant-winning variety, Kleenex bingo, and birthday cakes, and in the end everything is connected, which is the whole point. As Massoud says to Matthew, "Just as the Assiniboine joins the Red River and together they flow into Lake Winnipeg, we are all connected, agha". The beauty of the film, beyond the visual aesthetics, is the discovery of the connectedness. The details of this alternate reality are so unique that they stand out, so once the pieces start coming together, it's easy to see how they all fit, but it's possible a second viewing would unveil even more.
I wondered what the purpose of the character being named after the director (and played by the director) was, as it's hard to know when something plays with the surreal in this way what of this film is personal. Has Rankin found himself deeply ingrained in the Iranian-Canadian community, and this is his message to his country and the world of how warm and kind the community is, or is this simply an absurdist conceit that he really committed to? I have not delved into the works of Jafar Panahi yet, but my understanding of the Iranian filmmaker is he often works blurring the lines between what's real and personal and what is fiction. So as much as Rankin is tapping into Winnipeg's most notable filmmaker, he's also reaching outward to much broader cinematic influences (he also cites Iranian cinema legends Abbas Kiastroiami and Sohrab Shahid-Saless as influences as well as other Winnipeg directors John Paizs and John Paskievich, among others. I am, of course, unfamiliar with any of these).
The climax of the film finds Matthew finally reaching his mother, only to learn a stranger has been taking care of her in the years since he's been away. There's an unspoken element, that there was distance between Matthew and his parents, and that in that distance someone else has filled the gap. Though not presented as "big drama" in the moment, there is something nakedly raw and emotional about this idea, that we can find ourselves more connected to strangers than our own family, and also in that disconnect we can lose ourselves.
It seems 2026 is the year I invest more of my time in Canadian film. I really need to see Rankin's debut The Twentieth Century, and I need to do a filmography walk through of Maddin as well.
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