Sydney Sweeney as Millie Calloway in The Housemaid. Daniel McFadden/Lionsgate

The Christmas movie season is always better when there’s a real counter-programming wild card showing next door to all the feel-good holiday drivel. Last year’s jolting, gorgeous “Nosferatu” made the mainstream swill easier to take.

This year, we have “The Housemaid,” which lacks blue extraterrestrials and Jack Black wrastlin’ a CGI Anaconda. What it does offer will make you never look at Sydney Sweeney or Amanda Seyfried the same way again.

“The Housemaid” begins like a soft-hearted drama, the kind of family drama that ends with everyone hugging. True to the nature of the story, looks can be deceiving.

We meet Millie (played by Sydney Sweeney), who is struggling to find work and living in her car. Millie is thrilled to book an interview with the Winchester family, whose wealth is evident in their home and chic fashion choices.

Nina Winchester (played by Amanda Seyfried) interviews Millie for a housekeeper position and immediately senses a kinship and a good working relationship between them. On the other hand, there’s Nina’s husband Andrew (played by Brandon Sklenar) and cold-as-ice daughter (played by Indiana Ellie), who both appear harder to win over. Once Millie takes the job and moves in with the Winchesters, things immediately go wrong.

I wound up seeing Paul Feig’s “The Housemaid” as a compromise — my high school buddy and I missed the early show for the third “Avatar” and, instead of sitting through another 3.5 hours of James Cameron’s CGI self-indulgences, we settled for something else. For the first 10 minutes, we thought we made the wrong choice, as the early scenes suggest a Lifetime TV movie — but no, we were being set up.

Actually, “The Housemaid” is sordid, trashy and outrageous, full of gore and nudity so plentiful and carefree, you’d think it was still the 1990s. In other words, the movie’s great.

This is the kind of domestic thriller that once ruled the ’90s (titles like “Fatal Attraction,” “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle,” “Basic Instinct” and “Single White Female” come to mind). It more than earns the R rating and shocks for going a lot further than expected. I’m not saying the promotional materials lied, exactly, but anyone expecting a farce should be warned. The less you know going in, the better.

Seyfried, in one of the year’s best performances, is excellent playing someone who appears to struggle with how she presents herself. Sweeney (who was far better in “Christy”) has her moments as well, and the two leads have great chemistry, even here, but make no mistake, it’s Seyfried’s movie.

Akin to this year’s “Companion,” “Oh, Hi!” and “Keeper,” as savage, contemporary responses to love story cliches and the notion of blissful romance. What’s the cynical take-away from these movies? That “happily ever after” is an utter fantasy, as you’re marrying a person, not an idea, and the presentation of domestic bliss is simply a disguise if the root of the relationship is rotten. In other words, this is a perfect date movie.

“The Housemaid” is far nastier than Feig’s “A Simple Favor” (2018) but a similar pleasure in how it applies dark humor, social commentary and a send up of domestic behavior, when it could have settled for being safe and formulaic. I want to encourage Feig to give up on mainstream comedy (the underrated “Spy” from 2015 is his peak) and keep exploring Adrian Lyne’s old stomping grounds.

Feig turned to the thriller genre only after his lavish, overhyped and underwhelming “Ghostbusters: Answer the Call” (2016) flopped hard. Clearly, the filmmaker has a wild side he needs to keep exploring.

“The Housemaid” is long and patiently told, managing to provide some clever red herrings and even finds time to include a reference to Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon” (1975). The screenplay by Rebecca Sonnenshine (based on the 2022 novel by Frieda McFadden) explores how a natural friendship can become fractured when one of the two holds power and privilege over the other. Simply put, can someone be friends with their boss? This uneasy question is made discomforting for the film’s first act, until things get truly nutty.

(3 out of 4 stars)

Barry Wurst II is the founder of the Hawaii Film Critics Society and teaches film classes at University of Hawai’i Maui College.