THE HOUSEMAID

*CUT TO THE CHASE*

NOTE: This spoiler was submitted by Jeremy

The film starts as Millie Calloway (Sydney Sweeney) arrives at the home of the wealthy Winchester family living on Long Island. She meets housewife Nina (Amanda Seyfried), who shows her around the house and explains that the housemaid job she applied for is a live-in position. Millie hands her a big resume with several qualifications, but Millie narrates how she doesn’t think she’s gonna hear back from Nina since her resume is a bunch of lies.

Millie is shown to be living out of her car and struggling to find work after being released from prison after ten years. She is surprised to get a phone call from Nina inviting her to take up the job.

Millie starts to take up her duties as housemaid and meets the soft-spoken groundskeeper Enzo (Michele Morrone) before meeting Nina’s husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) and their daughter Cecelia/”Cece” (Indiana Elle). Nina shows Millie to her bedroom, an attic upstairs that has a deadbolt lock.

One morning, Millie hears Nina yelling and trashing the kitchen in a rage because she cannot find some notes for a PTA speech and thinks Millie threw them out. Andrew comes to calm her down and then apologizes to Millie for Nina’s behavior. Millie later meets Andrew’s mother, Evelyn (Elizabeth Perkins), who brings her good China to be kept safe with her son. When Millie goes to meet with her parole officer (something she hides from the Winchesters), Nina gives her a hard time about not taking time off until Andrew says it’s okay.

Millie tries to connect with Cece, who doesn’t receive Millie very well. Nina tells Millie to pick Cece up from ballet class, but when she gets there, she finds that Cece is having a playdate with another girl, whose mother confirms over the phone with Nina. Millie later hears from another mom at ballet that it was rumored that Nina tried to drown Cece in the tub when she was an infant and then tried to commit suicide before being committed to a psych ward.

Millie has trouble sleeping and goes to the basement, which is Andrew’s “man cave”. He sees her there and joins her, telling Millie how Nina has always had a troubled past. She lost her parents in a house fire when she was a child, which Andrew thinks she may have started herself. Nina catches them together and tries to fire Millie, but she begs Nina to give her a second chance. Nina relents and agrees, but warns Millie to “stay the fuck away” from Andrew.

Nina continues to mess with Millie, like talking about her with the other housewives in the neighborhood, as well as revealing that she was lying about expecting another baby like she told Millie when they first met. Nina later asks Millie to book tickets to a Broadway show that Andrew wants to see so they can spend the weekend together. When Millie does get the tickets, Nina says the show falls on a weekend where she is taking Cece to art camp, so she berates Millie for getting nonrefundable tickets. Andrew tells Millie that he can go with her, so they go in secret. Andrew also mentions to Millie that he is not Cece’s biological father, which she doesn’t know about.

Millie and Andrew get dinner after the show and check into the hotel in adjoining rooms. She finds dozens of angry texts from Nina and shows them to Andrew. He gets Millie to relax before they start to kiss and eventually have sex.

The two return home the next day, with Nina apologizing to Millie for her texts. Nina later brings up Millie’s prison sentence to Andrew out of nowhere before giving Millie her car to drive around since her actual car is “embarrassing”. At the grocery store, Millie learns from one of Nina’s friends that Nina tracked her phone, meaning she knows about the affair. The cops show up after the car is reported stolen, and Andrew comes to bail Millie out.

Nina confronts Millie and Andrew after finding a Playbill and knows they slept together. After blowing up on Andrew, he orders her to leave the house, which Nina does. Millie and Andrew begin a relationship together over some time, but Millie gets startled when Enzo shows up outside after having previously warned her to get away from the house, causing her to drop a tray with Evelyn’s China. Andrew sends Enzo away before helping Millie clean up. They go to her room and make out after sharing a drink.

Millie later wakes up, having been drugged by Andrew. She finds all of her stuff gone, and she is now locked in the room. Millie begins frantically pounding on the door.

The film jumps back to when Nina left the house, which is what she was planning all along. She writes a letter to Cece, explaining her whole life up to this point. Nina brings up the fire that killed her parents, but she always resented Andrew implying she had something to do with it. After going in and out of foster homes, Nina got impregnated by her college professor, who wanted nothing to do with Cece. Nina eventually met Andrew and got married to him, but he later showed his true colors when he brought up being displeased with Nina’s roots showing in her hair. He locked her in the attic until she plucked off 100 strands of hair with visible follicles. He forced her to do it again because one single strand did not have a follicle. When Andrew finally let Nina out of the attic, he drugged her and staged it to look like she tried to drown Cece and had her committed. Although she got out, she tried to get herself and Cece out of the house with Enzo’s help, but Andrew found out and had her committed again or would keep locking her away for every little mistake. Seeing no other way out, Nina found a pawn in Millie to take her place by wining Andrew over.

The film goes back to Millie’s perspective, showing what landed her in prison. In school, she killed her roommate’s boyfriend when she caught him raping her, but the roommate denied everything, and Millie served ten years out of a 15 year sentence.

In the present, Andrew explains that he locked Millie in the attic because of the broken China. He forces her to cut into her stomach with a plate shard 21 times for every broken piece, and then he will let her out. Millie makes the cuts and waits to be let out. When Andrew comes in, Millie stabs him in the neck with a concealed knife before locking him in the room. She comes back and destroys the rest of Evelyn’s China before slipping him some pliers to rip out his front tooth in retribution for his torture. Andrew reluctantly does so, but Millie leaves him there.

Nina is with Cece and is ready to start a new life, but Cece says they should bring Millie with her. Nina goes back to the house and goes to the attic, thinking Millie is still locked in there. She realizes too late when Millie comes back, and Andrew bursts out of the room, throwing Nina down the stairs before chasing after Millie. She manages to disappear, leaving Nina to deal with her husband. He tries to convince her that she still needs him, but she tells him how much he and his mom suck before Millie emerges and pushes Andrew over the spiral staircase, smashing his head and neck on the way down to his death. Nina tries to stage the scene like Andrew fell trying to change a lightbulb and tells Millie to get out, apologetically telling her she didn’t deserve any of what happened.

The police arrive after Enzo helps Nina clean up. The officer interviewing Nina notes the stab wound in Andrew’s neck, but since Andrew was the cop’s sister’s original fiance, whom Nina had heard of, the cop appears to cover for Nina since it is all but outright stated that Andrew tormented the woman’s sister as well.

Nina later attends Andrew’s funeral with Cece and denies knowing the details of his death to Evelyn. She then spots Millie talking to Cece and then hands Millie a check for $100,000 to start a new life.

Millie later goes to a job interview for another housewife, who says that Nina specifically suggested her for the job. Millie sees a bruise on the woman’s wrist as she implies her husband is also abusive, and that she might know what Millie has done in the past. Millie simply asks when she can start.

Millie Calloway has been released from prison after ten years for the killing of her college roommate's boyfriend when he was raping her. Millie takes up a position as a live-in housemaid for the Winchester family. Wife and mother Nina makes Millie's life a nightmare with her demands and overbearing behavior, while Millie finds herself falling for husband and father Andrew. After Nina learns that Millie and Andrew had an affair, she leaves the house.

The truth is that Andrew is an abusive husband who locks Nina in the attic (which is now Millie's room) for any small mistake that she makes, and then forces her to torture herself in order to be let out. In the past, Andrew staged it so that it looked like Nina tried to drown her daughter Cece in the tub before attempting suicide, leading to her getting committed to a psych ward. Nina purposely hired Millie to seduce Andrew and get herself out of the marriage. In the present, Millie and Andrew start a relationship, but he locks her in the attic after she breaks his mother's China by accident.

Millie frees herself after doing what Andrew wants her to do and then stabbing him in the neck. She locks him in the attic and forces him to undergo one of his own torture tactics for his freedom. Nina goes back for Millie at Cece's behest, unintentionally freeing Andrew. He tries to kill the ladies, but Millie pushes him down the stairs to his death. A cop whose sister was Andrew's ex-fiance covers for Nina, knowing his death was not an accident.

Nina gives Millie money to start a new life, but she also recommends her to another woman with an abusive husband, implicitly hoping Millie might take care of him like she did with Andrew.