I’ll be honest here: I didn’t actually intend to see this movie, but the one in which Bob Dylan takes up ping-pong was sold out, and Sofa-Buddy couldn’t persuade me that Zootopia 2 was a good idea.
So: I guess you could call it a modern gothic novel, with strong overtones of Alfred Hitchcock but an over-the-top body horror aesthetic.
Mille (Sydney Sweeney) an overqualified twenty-something, takes a job as a live-in help working for Nina (Amanda Seyfried). Nina has an unbelievably perfect and opulent home, not to mention an unbelievably perfect and opulent husband, Andrew, (Brenda Skienar) and one of those unnerving children who stares at everyone and speaks in single sentences. She has a dolls house in her room which reproduces the actual house in perfect detail. There is a sinister groundskeeper (Michele Morrone) and Mille’s room is an attic with a locked window and a lockable door to which she is not given the key. On her first full day at work, Mille finds the perfect house in a squalidly messy state and has to clean up. Nina has beautiful shiny friends from the PTA who say the most terrible things about her behind her back. Andrew has a grim, sour dominating mother (Elizabeth Perkins). Nina gives Mille increasingly unreasonable instructions and then punishes her when she carries them out, but Andrew sticks up for her. When Mille buys the wrong theatre tickets on Nina’s behalf Andrew clandestinely suggests that they, the husband and the housemaid, could go to the show together. What could possibly go wrong?
So: who exactly is playing who, and who is not what they initially seemed? The answer, without wishing to give anything away is A: Everybody B: Everybody and C: Everybody.
The twists and revelations come through at exactly the right pace: I neither felt overwhelmed, nor tempted to call out “get on with it”. And once everyone’s cards were on the table, it did seem that everything hung together. Preposterous, yes, but a perfectly fair-play narrative. (I still haven’t entirely forgiven Mothers' Instinct, or, in fact Saltburn indeed that Alan Bennet one about the old peoples ward for Cheating. ) But it is so convoluted that it requires two heavily narrated flashbacks to re-set at least two of the major characters. Once we understand what is really happening, the lockable attic room starts to do sterling service, and the perfect house is sprinkled with a substantial amount of gore. There is a genuine nastiness to the final scenes in which everyone forces everyone else to do horrible things to each other.
The denouement is perhaps a smidgen too neat, but the awful end awfully and the slightly less awful end slightly less awfully. I was fairly relieved that the dolls house turned out to have nothing to do with the plot. People who don’t actively dislike this sort of thing will find that it is the sort of thing they don’t actively dislike.
So: I guess you could call it a modern gothic novel, with strong overtones of Alfred Hitchcock but an over-the-top body horror aesthetic.
Mille (Sydney Sweeney) an overqualified twenty-something, takes a job as a live-in help working for Nina (Amanda Seyfried). Nina has an unbelievably perfect and opulent home, not to mention an unbelievably perfect and opulent husband, Andrew, (Brenda Skienar) and one of those unnerving children who stares at everyone and speaks in single sentences. She has a dolls house in her room which reproduces the actual house in perfect detail. There is a sinister groundskeeper (Michele Morrone) and Mille’s room is an attic with a locked window and a lockable door to which she is not given the key. On her first full day at work, Mille finds the perfect house in a squalidly messy state and has to clean up. Nina has beautiful shiny friends from the PTA who say the most terrible things about her behind her back. Andrew has a grim, sour dominating mother (Elizabeth Perkins). Nina gives Mille increasingly unreasonable instructions and then punishes her when she carries them out, but Andrew sticks up for her. When Mille buys the wrong theatre tickets on Nina’s behalf Andrew clandestinely suggests that they, the husband and the housemaid, could go to the show together. What could possibly go wrong?
So: who exactly is playing who, and who is not what they initially seemed? The answer, without wishing to give anything away is A: Everybody B: Everybody and C: Everybody.
The twists and revelations come through at exactly the right pace: I neither felt overwhelmed, nor tempted to call out “get on with it”. And once everyone’s cards were on the table, it did seem that everything hung together. Preposterous, yes, but a perfectly fair-play narrative. (I still haven’t entirely forgiven Mothers' Instinct, or, in fact Saltburn indeed that Alan Bennet one about the old peoples ward for Cheating. ) But it is so convoluted that it requires two heavily narrated flashbacks to re-set at least two of the major characters. Once we understand what is really happening, the lockable attic room starts to do sterling service, and the perfect house is sprinkled with a substantial amount of gore. There is a genuine nastiness to the final scenes in which everyone forces everyone else to do horrible things to each other.
The denouement is perhaps a smidgen too neat, but the awful end awfully and the slightly less awful end slightly less awfully. I was fairly relieved that the dolls house turned out to have nothing to do with the plot. People who don’t actively dislike this sort of thing will find that it is the sort of thing they don’t actively dislike.
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