So, the problem here is that I have not decided whether I like this or not. In general, it’s a positive sign that I saw this couple days ago and I still feel like I need to write about it, but at the same time, I’m not thinking about the message of the movie, I’m thinking about the filmmaking.

There will be spoilers, but I will warn you before I get there.

So, a young woman, Millie, finds a new job as a maid. From the start, there seems to be something wrong here. The room she is given seems suspect and there’s some other foreshadowing as well. Soon enough, the lady of the house starts to act very aggressively towards her. Our heroine is fired multiple times but the man of the house always defuses the situation in the end.

We also learn that our heroine is actually on parole. She needs to have regular meetings with her parole officer and the demands of her work is making this difficult. There are many stories about the lady of the house going on in the surrounding community. Both the other rich people and their help have their own stories. There’s also a mysterious gardener who always seems to be keeping an eye on Millie, who finds it creepy, but to us it’s depicted more as him being unable to tell something to her because of something unseen.

Okay, so it’s hard to discuss this movie without going further into spoilers, but I’ll still say a few things about the movie. First, it is too long. It’s 131 minutes. Maybe cut like 20 minutes out of that? Second, it is attempting to be a modern version of an erotic thriller. I’ve talked about this before: We don’t get enough eroticism in mainstream movies these days. We don’t want puritanism. Sure, you could point out that there’s always porn, but that is exactly the problem. If young people only have the porn as a basis for their understanding of sex, that’s not going to lead to anything good. No wonder fewer and fewer young people are sexually active.

All in all, the movie is pretty interesting. You can kind of intuit the twists, at least the big ones, because you have seen movies before and you can see how they are being broadcast from the start of the movie. Also, if you know that someone has been in prison for ten years because of something they did as a teenager, there aren’t that many crimes they could have potentially done that would be interesting from the point of view of a movie…

Spoiler territory ahead:

You know where this is going very early, when the wife tells Millie as a joke that one day she will trip and fall and die in the stairs. She doesn’t but the stairs do come into play. Also, the maid’s room turns out to be built specifically to be a cell within the house where the husband can imprison the women in his life for slight mistakes.

Also, Millie is a murderer and the lady of the house hired her specifically for this reason. The lady of the house isn’t actually psychotic. Instead she plays that role in order to get her husband to divorce her, because the husband is actually extremely manipulative and weirdly violent. The wife was actually planning to get out and get Millie to kill him, because she was afraid that there was no other way out of the situation.

Now, I have nothing against feminism. I do identify as intersectional feminist. Yet, when in the end, the movie turns into a weird feminist movie where the sisterhood comes together to protect each other, I don’t really know what to think. Even the daughter, who has been very cold towards Millie throughout, asks her mother to go back into the house to save Millie. That doesn’t work out as expected, but that did still lead to the sisters closing ranks to fight the man. The final scene of the movie is Millie being hired again to another household with hints that she is expected to kill yet another man.

One of the problems I see with the message of the movie is that it seems like Sydney Sweeney is a republican. If so, she is very much supportive of what the husband is doing in the movie. That is part of what the modern American conservatism stands for. Sure, they might use dog-whistles to hide it, but that is the situation. She is an executive producer on the movie as well. On the other hand, her costar and another executive producer Amanda Seyfried has openly criticized Charlie Kirk and spoken positively about socialism. That is a weird combo.

Also, Paul Feig, the director, has in the past made many feminist movies (to mixed results) or at least how he understands feminism.

Whatever the politics behind the movie are, the execution is not the best. Also, the message is kind of problematic. Then again, personally, as a cis straight white man, I don’t really see myself in these rich assholes. We should come together to oppose them. We should not let them exist, but killing them might be for movies only. I would much rather just get rid of private ownership (personal ownership is fine – the difference being that you can and should be able to own your car and your house or apartment, but you don’t need to own the means of production, unless you are the one actually using them).