The Housemaid

Millie Calloway is desperate. She has a criminal record — having served time for killing an abusive ex-boyfriend in self-defense — and is living out of her car when she's offered a live-in housemaid position at the Winchester estate in Connecticut. The mansion is pristine; the Winchesters are wealthy and beautiful.

Nina Winchester is increasingly erratic — paranoid, demanding, accusing Millie of theft, locking her in her tiny attic room, ordering impossible tasks. Andrew Winchester is the opposite: handsome, polite, gentle, sympathetic to Millie when his wife's behavior turns cruel. Their daughter Cecelia is quiet and observant. Andrew and Millie grow closer. They begin an affair.

Millie investigates the locked room at the top of the house. She finds evidence that terrible things have happened there. She begins to suspect Nina is unraveling because of something inside this marriage that she can't escape.

The twist: Andrew is the predator. He has tortured and imprisoned women — including Nina — using the locked attic as his private cell. Nina's erratic behavior was deliberate, a hostile performance designed to drive Millie away and spare her. Nina has been trying to find a replacement she can leave behind so she can finally escape.

Millie understands. Her past has given her exactly the combination of instinct and willingness Nina lacks — Millie has killed an abuser before. The two women align against Andrew.

In the climax, they lure him into the locked room and trap him there. Andrew dies in his own torture chamber, killed by the system he built.

The film ends with Nina and Millie free of him, the secret resolved, both women survivors of men who thought they would not be.