luster

In December 2025, Lionsgate released a psychological thriller based on a self-published novel that had gone viral on TikTok. Paul Feig, known until then for comedies such as ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’ or ‘Spies’, was in charge of directing it, and the film, starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried, ended up being the biggest box office success for both actresses, the director, and one of the most profitable thrillers in recent years. It is about ‘The assistant’which this Friday the 5th comes to streaming from the hand of Prime Video. In it we will meet Millie (Sydney Sweeney), on parole for involuntary manslaughter, who accepts a job as a live-in maid for a wealthy family. And little else can be said without ruining the experience, because Millie soon begins to detect strange behavior in her boss (Amanda Seyfried) and that the relationship between her employers is not what it seems, in a trotted return to the erotic thriller of the nineties that actually plays as much at being a fast-paced pocket book full of twists and humor as it is an intuitive piece of post-feminist pulp. The film works as a box of surprises where Sweeney and Seyfried shine with two interpretations that seem to have been raised differently: The first is more B-series, the other is more melodramatic. It is this clash of registers that gives a self-conscious and unpredictable touch to the film, and also what makes the genre mixer work at full capacity: serious psychological thriller at the beginning, revenge fantasy later (also changing, for the better, the final stretch of the original novel). ‘The Housemaid’ opened in third place at the US box office with $18.9 million, behind a colossus like ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ and the animated film ‘David’. It was not a spectacular exit, but its secret was that word of mouth worked and it did not fall: it barely fell from its privileged position for weeks, and it performed very well at the international box office. The final gross was $401.7 million worldwide, against a production budget of $35 million. It is not surprising that the sequel is already in the works. In Xataka | Among the 19 premieres on Netflix this week, the documentary about the trial that Michael Jackson experienced in his final years