- - What the Chilling Ending of 'The Housemaid' Is Telling Us

JP MangalindanDecember 20, 2025 at 10:26 AM

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The Reckoning in The Housemaid’s Ending Daniel McFadden/Lionsgate

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Spoilers below.

Millie Calloway drives toward the Winchesters’ home in a rusted-out Honda sedan, seemingly held together by duct tape and a prayer. The road is lined with trees that open onto manicured lawns. When the house appears, it looks like a promising refuge. But as she’ll eventually learn, this house was built to be a cage.

Millie (Sydney Sweeney) needs this job. Fresh out on early parole after serving 10 years, she’s been sleeping in her car, surviving on the margins of a world that’s already decided her worth. When Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried) offers her a live-in nanny position, Millie accepts without hesitation. The attic bedroom is barely larger than a closet, its narrow window sealed shut. Still, to Millie, it feels full of possibility.

Almost immediately, life with the Winchesters begins to resemble a story Millie thinks she knows. The pristine kitchen she saw during her job interview is now a mess: wine-stained glasses, dishes crowding the counters. Nina is brittle and volatile, prone to sudden accusations that evaporate as quickly as they arrive. Andrew (Brandon Sklenar), her husband, is calm and reassuring—the kind of man who lowers his voice when others raise theirs, who apologizes to Millie afterward with a look that says, I know this is hard. Their young daughter, Cecilia (Indiana Elle), watches everything with careful attention.

Nina accuses Millie of throwing out her PTA notes, tearing through drawers in a frantic search. Andrew soothes her, holding her until the storm passes. “Tomorrow will be better,” he promises. Tomorrow never is.

The inconsistencies pile up. Nina calls Millie to pick up Cecilia from dance class, only for another mother to insist the plan was always for Cecilia to stay the night at her house. Later, Nina reveals during tea with a group of school moms that she isn’t pregnant—despite having told Millie otherwise. Other parents and nannies whisper about Nina’s psychiatric stay, about an attempt to drown her own child.

One night, Millie pads downstairs to watch TV. Family Feud plays, the studio audience’s laughter oddly comforting. Andrew appears, restless too. They talk about Millie’s estrangement from her parents, about Nina’s parents dying in a fire when she was young. The conversation feels easy, unguarded. Then Nina appears in the doorway. She tells Millie to leave in the morning, then relents, issuing a warning instead: Stay away from my husband.

Daniel McFadden/Lionsgate

The Housemaid shifts gears after Nina humiliates Millie over Broadway tickets she insists were booked incorrectly. Andrew intervenes privately. Why not take the tickets and enjoy the night herself? When Millie admits she has no one to bring, he offers to go with her.

The evening unfolds like a fantasy. They have dinner and dance, Millie barely hearing the music over the thrum of her own pulse. Back at the hotel, she studies her reflection and tells herself not to destroy the fragile stability she’s only just regained. Then Nina’s text messages arrive: dozens of them, escalating, threatening to fire her. Alarmed, Millie shows Andrew. He promises to handle it. Thunder cracks. Rain pounds. The attraction overwhelms them, and they spend the night together.

The next morning, Andrew rushes them back to the house. Nina arrives soon after, exhausted, her makeup smudged. Millie is sent to the grocery store, where another mother mentions Nina may have installed tracking software on her phone. In the parking lot, police approach—Nina has reported the borrowed car as stolen. Andrew bails her out. Back home, the confrontation explodes. Andrew tells Nina to leave. She sobs as she drives away.

Courtesy of Lionsgate

For a brief stretch, the house feels transformed. Andrew and Millie cook, dance, imagine peace. The following morning, the gardener Enzo (Michele Morrone) appears unexpectedly in the window. Startled, Millie drops a tray of breakfast dishes, shattering the family’s prized china. Andrew fires Enzo on the spot. Later, he carries Millie upstairs, pours champagne, and makes love to her. When she wakes, the room has been stripped bare. The door is locked. This is a lesson, Andrew explains. A punishment.

Here, the film reveals what it has been doing all along. Every humiliation, every erratic accusation, every moment Nina seemed to unravel was a performance. The unstable wife was a character she played to expose the real villain of the story: Andrew.

Cut to Nina alone in a hotel room. She dances to Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone,” wine bottle in hand.

Daniel McFadden/Lionsgate

Through flashbacks, her marriage comes into focus. Nina met Andrew shortly after giving birth to Cecilia, swept up in his charm. They married quickly, happily—until the night he noticed her roots growing in. When she missed her salon appointment to have them touched up, he locked her in the attic storage room.

His demand was precise: Pluck 100 strands of her own hair, follicles intact, and slide them beneath the door in an envelope. When one strand came loose without its root, he made her start over. She sat on that floor for hours, pulling at her scalp, feeding the envelope beneath the door like an offering.

When Nina emerged, she found Cecilia unharmed. Relief barely registered before she collapsed, drugged by the bottled water Andrew left behind. When she woke, Cecilia was unconscious in the bathtub. Andrew called the authorities. The scene looked exactly as he intended: a mother who had tried to drown her own child. Nina was institutionalized, her credibility erased.

She stayed silent in their marriage to protect and stay with Cecilia. She learned to comply. And slowly, she began to plan.

Daniel McFadden/Lionsgate

Millie was never just a nanny. Nina hired her precisely because she was young and attractive (Andrew’s type), but also because Millie had killed before—sentenced to 15 years for defending her college roommate from sexual assault. Nina studied Millie’s case history with care. She understood that when Andrew revealed his true nature, Millie wouldn’t submit. She would fight back.

Back in the attic in the present day, Andrew orders Millie to carve 21 lines into her own stomach—one for each piece of shattered china. Millie plays along. When he inspects her wounds with clinical interest, she strikes, driving something sharp into his neck. In the chaos, she locks him inside.

Linda Ronstadt’s “Blue Bayou” plays as Millie gathers the remaining china. Andrew pleads through the door, apologizes, blames his temper. Millie slides a pair of pliers beneath the door. “Pull your tooth out,” she says simply. Eventually, he does.

Daniel McFadden/Lionsgate

Nina returns to the house to free Millie. But when she unlocks the attic door, Andrew bursts out, throwing Nina down the stairs. He finds her again on the second-floor landing, suddenly conciliatory, his smile missing a tooth. “Can we sweep this under the rug?” he asks.

“You have a wife who fucking hates you,” Nina spits back. “I almost feel sorry for you.”

Andrew lunges; Nina feints. Millie pushes Andrew over the railing. Nina drops a lightbulb beside his body, scattering glass and the tooth to sell the scene as an accident. Millie leaves before the police arrive.

The officer who questions Nina listens, then mentions that Andrew once dated her sister. One day, her sister showed up on her doorstep, and she was never quite the same. A silence settles between them, weighted with understanding. The officer has seen this before. Men like Andrew—handsome, charming—rarely face consequences. More often, the system turns on the women who survive them.

“This is just one of those freak cases,” the officer says at last. It was a freak accident. Case closed.

Courtesy of Lionsgate

At Andrew’s funeral, Nina stands beside his mother (Elizabeth Perkins), accepting condolences. Mrs. Winchester leans in. “When they found Andrew, he was missing a tooth,” she says. Then, almost as an afterthought: “Teeth are a privilege.” Whether Mrs. Winchester understands what truly happened matters less than what she reveals in that moment: a worldview shaped by hierarchy and control—one Andrew inherited.

From a distance, Nina slips Millie a check for $100,000—enough to start again.

In the final scene, Millie sits across from another woman in another immaculate kitchen. The woman mentions her husband, pulling knives from a block and shoving them back in with pointed care. “Nina Winchester recommended you,” she says, noticeably covering up her bruises.

Millie doesn’t flinch. “How can I help?” she asks.

The Housemaid

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What Millie carries forward isn’t rage but the ability to see danger early—to hear what isn’t being said, to understand how control disguises itself as care. Nina didn’t just escape her cage; she left the door open behind her for Millie, who’s now doing the same.

The film’s final truth isn’t simply that monsters exist, but that they’re often protected by charm, reputation, and the status quo. As those of us in the audience know, freedom doesn’t always arrive through institutional rescue or public reckoning. The women in The Housemaid may have Millie now acting as a vigilante, protecting and enacting justice for them—but victims in real life don’t have that kind of privilege. Instead, hope may lie elsewhere: in community.

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