One of the family. Paul Feig’s film review

Of course, Feig’s passage, despite the educated premises, is at times out of focus, out of proportion: One of the family perhaps he tends to rush too much, to burn some good ideas too soon, to carefully construct his setups but also being careful to show more or less clearly the threads that support the story and its turning points.

But perhaps, more than smudges, these are real indications of a placement. One of the family in fact, upon closer inspection, it has the heavy hand and deliberately excessive approach of the glossy ’90s thrillers and widely read novels, the “train” pulps, those all gutsy, direct, no frills, which at times did not skimp on prurient atmospheres.

Or at least he would like to have it. Because Feig lacks bite to really be part of that world he alludes to. Of course at times One of the family it touches on apt suggestions: it tells well, for example, the heavy, morbid air of the domestic space and has Amanda Seyfried on its side who is perhaps the only one to have understood the meaning of the film, to have grasped its kitsch and playful soul, which it evidently looks to in its sought-after overacting passages. For the rest, the feeling is that Paul Feig has too little fun, exceeding only in a few cases. One of the family it takes itself too seriously, it lingers excessively on the story of the bodies, on the construction of the seductive relationship between the characters, it revolves around the spaces of the story but rarely makes the narrative and the images really explode.

It is no coincidence that the narrative remains bogged down more or less quickly in the structures of a piscotic drama without real peaks but increasingly punctuated by automatisms, which, of course, rarely slows down but which upon closer inspection drags wearily towards the final twist, a passage that shakes the film but which shortly after the story doesn’t quite know what to do with.

Paul Feig’s cinema really has no breath. It’s not just a question of direction, which in fact in the last act actually places a couple of passages of a morbid thriller, not bad but precisely of rhythm, of management of spaces, of general haste in managing the plot. As One of the family arrives at the end but does so without real characters, reduced to sketches with unexpressed potential to which the flashbacks wearily try to give a depth that in the long run is illusory, splinters of an ending that seems above all positional, which reveals how much this, for Feig, could be his potential Gone Girl tailor-made Penny Dreadful and yet, as soon as it is grabbed, it runs away. As if this new phase of his cinema was already over.

Titolo originale: The Housemaid
Reign: Paul Feig
Interpretety: Sydney Sweyey, Brandone Skneed, Amana Moreded, Michele, Fele Fergus, Solien Elel
Distribution: 01 Distribution
Duration: 131′
Origin: USA, 2025