I did a thing. I wasted $25 on a premium rental of The Housemaid, Paul Feig's erotic psychological thriller starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried, with Brandon Sklenar as the suave Andrew Winchester.

I sat down expecting little and received... well, more than I bargained for — eventually.

Let me be upfront, the first act, and a lot of the movie in fact, is a greatest-hits compilation of tired tropes. New housekeeper arrives.

Man stares as she descends the stairs.

Wife is unhinged in ways that make you cock your head to one side like a confused golden retriever.

You've seen this film before. It's somewhere between The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and a Lifetime movie that got a serious budget injection.

The whole set-up is so tried-and-true that I had mentally written my one-star review before the slow dance to super charming music at the restaurant had even finished.

And yet. Something niggled.

Sydney Sweeney's Millie is undeniably gorgeous, because of course she is, and she carries herself through the early scenes with a kind of glazed, wide-eyed stillness that reads less as vulnerability and more as vacancy.

Dead eyes, an inability to emote, the performance is, to be generous, restrained.

To be less generous, she appears to be running on demo mode for a significant portion of the runtime.

Her backstory, when it fully emerges, does carry real weight.

Disowned, living in her car, on parole for killing a man who raped a woman and faced no consequences, her trajectory is one of compounding injustice, and it recontextualises her dead eyes as something more like dissociation

Dead eyes certainly ain’t Amanda Seyfried problem, because Amanda Seyfried does not have problems.

Amanda Seyfried has solutions.

She does the heavy lifting for the entire film with the kind of ferocious, unsettling commitment that makes you want to call her agent and send flowers simultaneously.

Every half-cocked smile, every unblinking stare; it's genuinely unnerving in the best possible way.

She is the reason to watch this film, and she knows it.

Brandon Sklenar's Andrew Winchester enters scenes like AI-ordered perfection, orders one of everything at dinner like a man who has never once checked a bill, and delivers his lines in a timbre so disarmingly sexy that you almost forgive Millie for the spectacular lapse in judgement that follows. Almost.

After they do what two people in a film like this inevitably do, the real story begins to unspool, and this is where The Housemaid earns its keep.

Nina's letter to her daughter Cece is a gut-punch wrapped in exposition; midst law degree Nina falls down the stereotypical hole of a pregnancy via a professor.

Suddenly, it is necessary for her to make a trade-off of dignity in a horrid job for health insurance and childcare, all before Andrew Winchester arrived and smelled vulnerability the way a narcissist always does; like blood in the water.

Sweeping the vulnerable young mum off her feet, it’s all storybook romance perfect, until it suddenly isn’t.

The attic. The drugged water. The locked door. A hundred hairs counted and slid under a door as proof of compliance.

The systematic, methodical destruction of a woman who had already survived so much. It is bleak and it is brilliant, and Amanda Seyfried makes you feel every single year of it.

The twist ending is a ripper. Full stop. It made me feel, upon reflection, entirely fine about having parted with my $25.

It is the Uno reverse card this story absolutely deserved, and it lands with the satisfying thwack of someone who has been extraordinarily patient and extraordinarily wronged.

There's no denying Sydney Sweeney has her charms, and everyone loves something new and shiny.

But you simply cannot beat old, and in this case, old means Amanda Seyfried ,absolutely consuming every scene she's given and leaving the rest of the cast to figure out the crumbs.

She is the reason The Housemaid works. She is, frankly, the reason to forgive it for everything it isn't.

Worth the $25, but only just, and almost entirely because of one woman.

You can WATCH THE TRAILER HERE (parental guidance advised - trailer contains violence)