The year opens with a curious double feature of Amanda Seyfried performances, and few actresses make for a stranger, more compelling pairing. In Paul Feig’s The Housemaid, Seyfried’s signature wide, otherworldly eyes are locked in combat with the shadowed glare of Sydney Sweeney in what initially plays like a loud, trashy, and commercially engineered thriller. As a Flixtor movie experience, The Housemaid is undeniably pulpy—an early-2026 hit built on screeching, glossy, woman-on-woman hostility and adapted from a bestselling novel series written, improbably, by a practicing brain surgeon.

Seyfried is at her most captivating when Nina Winchester’s inner chaos is allowed to surface. Her smile stretches unnervingly wide, pupils blown out as if receiving transmissions from another frequency. It’s a quality David Lynch once tapped into during Twin Peaks, and Feig lets echoes of that unsettling brilliance seep into Nina’s gilded suburban prison. Nina weaponizes her privilege and fragility with snide precision, turning domesticity into a psychological battleground.

The film, however, takes its time getting there. A misdirection-heavy first hour bogs things down, not helped by Brandon Sklenar’s oddly inert performance as Nina’s besotted husband—a character so bland he feels algorithmically generated. Sydney Sweeney fares better as Millie, particularly once the film stops forcing sympathy and allows her character to lean into a rawer, revenge-driven edge. When she finally goes all in, The Housemaid becomes far more watchable.

Still, this Flixtor movie strains under its ambitions. It gestures toward post-#MeToo commentary without fully committing to the implications, stretching its runtime well past the point of narrative efficiency. What emerges feels like Paul Feig attempting a Park Chan-wook-flavored Gone Girl—a comparison that ultimately flatters the film more than it earns.

Seyfried’s strangeness finds a far more intriguing outlet in The Testament of Ann Lee, a daring and solemnly eccentric counterpoint. Directed by Mona Fastvold and co-written with Brady Corbet, the film treats its subject—the Shaker movement and its ecstatic female leader—with reverent seriousness, no matter how conceptually strange things become. Every scene is approached as sacred text, lending the film a severity that both grounds and limits its wildest impulses.

Part musical, part historical meditation, The Testament of Ann Lee incorporates choreographed sequences inspired by Shaker hymns and rituals, with choreography by Celia Rowlson-Hall. Even so, a cautious tone keeps much of the madness at arm’s length. Moments that might have exploded with transgressive energy—such as an early montage juxtaposing Ann’s husband’s depravity (Christopher Abbott, unsettling as ever) with her traumatic childbirths—remain restrained, almost mournful.

There’s an admirable consistency to Fastvold’s vision, even if one occasionally longs for the provocation and dark humor of The Brutalist. Still, the film builds toward a quietly devastating finale, capped by a gender-swapped homage to The Godfather, performed by Seyfried and Thomasin McKenzie with unexpected tenderness.

Taken together, these two films showcase Seyfried at opposite ends of the cinematic spectrum: one a glossy, Fifty-Shades-adjacent suburban potboiler, the other a solemn, spiritually charged art film. As a Flixtor movie pairing, The Housemaid and The Testament of Ann Lee make for a fascinating study in contrast—proof that even when the material falters, Seyfried remains endlessly watchable.