“Camp is art that proposes itself seriously but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much’,” reads the oft-quoted 1964 Susan Sontag essay, Notes on “Camp”. Today, so much of what is intended to be “camp” lacks that necessary seriousness. But Paul Feig gets it. He’s quietly become one of our most reliable exponents of the art.
With the Blake Lively comedy-thriller A Simple Favour (2018), and this year’s sequel, the director’s revived the idea of “women’s pictures” – once the playground of Douglas Sirk and George Cukor – for the TikTok era. With The Housemaid, he takes one of these online sensations, Freida McFadden’s 2022 bestseller, and carefully teases out its profoundly silly twist. Victims of violence and misogyny are here treated with dignity, yet it still feels, as Sontag would describe, “extravagant” enough in its execution to be moreish. The Housemaid isn’t a particularly great film. But it is camp.
