Housemaid (2026), not The Housemaid (2025)

[jolshefsky]

I was able to find Housemaid (Louise Alston, U.S. 2026, 119 min.) on Hoopla. Note that it's particularly hard to find because it's almost the same name as the far more popular psychological thriller The Housemaid (Paul Feig, U.S. 2025, 131 min.) which was not made by illustrious movie-house The Asylum.

Right off the bat, it was pretty bad overall, a cheap cash-in on the popularity of Companion. The cold open is the best part in a way, when android (an "Asimov") Andi (Hailey Mauk) shorts out when she electrocutes her previous owner in a pool, and her face has some electrical burn marks and sparks. (I guess the movie gets a few points for plot for making the cold open unexplained, slowly revealed later, so the audience has to do a minimal amount of thought to connect the dots.)

The rest of the fembot content is glowing eyes, arm-keyboards, and flashes of internal mechanisms. Mauk does a good job as a domestic robot with emotionless speech and efficient movements. She's also got a few nude scenes and is quite attractive in a slender kind of way.

Basically Ben (Nic Caruccio) and Kayla (Emma Reinagel) are celebrating their anniversary, so naturally Kayla suddenly dies. I'd say this is a spoiler, but come on, the plot felt like it was written by a teenager at times, and the "it's our anniversary" means certain death. So when she dies, Andi is there and calls 911 on her arm-phone keypad, and then "activates" some "failsafe protocol" which I guess is where she got some of Kayla's memories, but apparently only a tiny bit, and she can impersonate Kayla's voice. Ben meets Diana (Juliette Cecile), relationship ensues, and Andi gets jealous and starts killing people.

The last 45 minutes of the film should have been 5 minutes and it just drags on and on. There's a scene where technician Victoria (Jaclyn Albergoni) finds out about Kayla being inside Andi somehow but Andi kills her (special effects: Mauk holds a wire that is wrapped around her arm while Victoria pokes away at a laptop. Wow.). From there it's just people getting killed by Andi, or severely injured so they run away and this goes on for fucking ever.

The description on IMDb says "After his wife's consciousness gets transferred into an android, a widower finds himself trapped in a deadly love triangle when the jealous AI goes to terrifying lengths to prevent him from moving on with a new woman." It's nowhere near like that. Kayla's consciousness is nowhere to be found, it's just Andi with a few extra memories.

Watch at your own risk.

[MalcfunctionCrazyfor]

Your sacrifice in watching this is appreciated.
Hard pass for me.