Remember those glossy psychological thrillers from the ’90s? Single White Female, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Sleeping with the Enemy. Movies that understood how to make privilege look sinister and domestic spaces feel dangerous. Paul Feig’s adaptation of Freida McFadden‘s bestseller The Housemaid channels that same energy, serving up a twisty thriller that had me grinning at how much fun it was having with itself.

Sydney Sweeney (Eden) stars as Millie, a young woman with a criminal record who can’t find work and has been living in her car for weeks. When Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried, Things Heard & Seen) offers her a live-in housekeeping position at a Long Island estate, Millie jumps at the chance. Nina seems to have everything: the gorgeous home, the charming husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar, It Ends with Us), the ballet-obsessed daughter. But things start feeling wrong almost immediately, and that attic room Millie’s staying in? The door locks from the outside.

The casting pays off spectacularly. Seyfried hasn’t been this entertainingly volatile since Mean Girls, playing Nina as someone who can shift from charming to unhinged in the space of a single conversation. Sweeney counters with impressive stillness, keeping Millie’s expression carefully neutral even when chaos erupts around her. You can feel how much that lack of reaction infuriates Nina. Sklenar proves he can do more than look handsome, though he certainly does that too, and gives as much skin as Sweeney does. Fair’s fair.

Screenwriter Rebecca Sonnenshine made smart choices trimming McFadden’s plot. The gardener Enzo (Michele Morrone, Subservience) gets reduced to near-nothing, which was probably necessary in this version of the story, though it makes his presence at all feel strange. (And if you’ve read the remaining books in the trilogy, you’ll likely have even more questions…)  What got expanded works better: more time with the women, more tension between them. Elizabeth Perkins (Indian Summer) shows up as Andrew’s mother, hair bleached a severe crystal blonde, radiating aristocratic contempt. I wish there had been more of her because, as is typical of Perkins, she makes every scene count and every word bite.

Feig (Spy), working with cinematographer John Schwartzman and production designer Elizabeth Jones, builds a world of clean lines and towering ceilings that makes the psychological mess feel even messier. Theodore Shapiro‘s score knows when to creep and when to strike. At my screening, you could tell who had read the book by the knowing laughs when certain objects appeared on screen. Yes, there’s a twist and it’s protected beautifully. Sonnenshine has layered in enough surprises that even savvy readers and mystery buffs might doubt themselves. The 131 minutes flew by. If this one hits, I hope we get that sequel.