Keyword – Film
Trefwoorden – Toronto film festival 2026, Naomi Watts, Drama films, Toronto film festival, Festivals, Luke Evans, Culture, Film
Title – The Housewife review – Naomi Watts is a secret suburban Nazi in an overcooked melodrama | Toronto film festival 2026 | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/benjamin-lee-film
Link – The Housewife review – Naomi Watts is a secret suburban Nazi in an overcooked melodrama | Toronto film festival 2026 | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-11T15:39:40.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/sep/11/toronto-film-festival-housewife-review

T he first scene of the 60s-set drama The Housewife is a closeup of a whistling kettle, an early “wink, wink” sign that we’re watching a story where tensions are set to boil but also that we’re watching a film of minimal subtlety.

Perhaps if it had been pitched closer to its adjacently named cousin The Housemaid , as a silly, sensationalist thriller, such heavy-handed decision-making would feel more well-suited. But instead, while some scenes flirt with the idea of something juicier, this is a stuffy and stodgy slab of self-serious, old-school Oscar bait complete with all the shouting, crying, throwing and finger-pointing one would expect. Think overcooked rather than slow simmer.

It’s all awfully dry despite being based on a true story that is, at least on paper, anything but. The housewife is Austrian-born Hermine, played by Naomi Watts with a decent enough accent, now living in Queens, New York, with an American husband (Luke Evans) and a tirelessly well-kept house. She’s the picture of suburban perfectionism even if her less-than-perfect dialogue starts to suggest there’s something else under the surface (“There are always things we don’t know about other people,” she purrs). When ambitious New York Times journalist Joseph (Tye Sheridan) receives a tip that a Nazi is living in the city, the road leads all the way to the Maspeth neighborhood and into Hermine’s house. Joseph is intent on speaking to her husband but she starts to entertain him instead, the two developing a strange, strained friendship.

Strangely handled like a big first-act twist, by ensuring that we don’t hear the husband’s American accent for a convenient while and hoping we don’t spot the very clear signposting, we discover that Hermine is the Nazi and has been stringing Joseph along. She claims that her job was a mere nurse, saving rather than slaughtering, and that by associating her with misdeeds, Joseph is showing his ignorance of what the Holocaust was like to live through (“You do not know war in America,” she tells him). But a story is a story and, in Joseph’s mind, a Nazi is a Nazi especially when he finds new information on what really happened.

After flirting with what might have been an interestingly perverse domestic psycho-thriller (Hermine’s interest in Joseph briefly veers between maternal and sexual), it becomes a plodding procedural involving Michael Imperioli’s aggrieved immigration officer and then an overheated courtroom drama. Watts, who gave one of her finest performances in years as another sleek, strong-willed woman in the 60s in Feud: Capote vs the Swans , is notably less convincing here, a little unsteady as she struggles to find her way through Hermine’s various masks and deceptions. There’s never the underlying chill there that I wanted; it’s all a little too artificial and self-aware to affect. The obvious comparison here is The Reader, a film I care very little for, but there, Kate Winslet nails an unshakable oddness that is sadly out of reach for Watts.

First-time director Ben Shirinian has fun with some very effective period immersion (even if Montreal never quite works as a New York stand-in) but he’s lumbered with a dramatically inert and psychologically shallow script from Alyssa Hill. She lightly toys with interesting questions of complicity and forgiveness and citizenship (Hermine’s white friends tell her she’ll pass her test as she’s “the kind of people we want around here”) but she just can’t find a way to elevate any of it into something that isn’t just another Holocaust movie. Even in such an overpopulated subgenre, there are still so many new and impactful ways in (Lena Olin, who steals one of the film’s only mildly wrenching scenes as she gives grim testimony, even starred in one with Anthony Hopkins back at Toronto in 2023 ) but despite the spikier source material, there’s nothing new or noteworthy to see here. As explained in his introductory speech at the premiere, Shirinian clearly wanted to make something about how the very worst behaviour can often be found in the most familiar and unthreatening packaging but surely films about the banality of evil shouldn’t be quite this banal?

The Housewife is premiering at the Toronto film festival and is seeking distribution