you all had me at nudity, The fact Audrey Plaza and Margaret Qualley are both starring has put it at must see for me, a
So my dad was like, "hey can you download The Housemaid onto your media server?" Which gave me a chuckle because, you know, Sydney Sweeney's boobs are basically an independent cast member on IMDB. So I added it and forgot about it, assuming it was trash. Was a couple of IPAs deep on Saturday night and flipping through Rotten Tomatoes scores, and saw it had 70%+ critic score so I thought I'd give it a shot. You know, there was an okay movie buried in there somewhere, but holy shit does that director have a contemptuous opinion of the audience's intelligence. The "twist" is delivered through - no kidding - a nonstop 20+ minute exposition dump of voice-over-plus-flashback, framed as one of the characters writing a retrospective letter, explicitly detailing every single step of the twist and how everything fit neatly together. It had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the skull. What a stupid fucking way to treat your audience. It actually would have been fun movie if they strung you along a little, showed you some of the context without explaining it, maybe allowing the watcher to look back at earlier parts of the movie and have a little, "ah hah!" moment. But nope: we do a setup, throw in a twist that had no hints, and immediately cut to a drawn-out re-contextualizing of every moment of the movie gone over in detail, lest the viewer have to turn their brain on for a moment. Some of these movies just make me angry when I turn them off because a decent movie was right fucking there. You just had to not treat people like assholes.