‘The Housewife’ Review: Naomi Watts Stuns, but This True Story Flounders Under Its Own Weight

TIFF: In the feature debut from Ben Shirinian and first-time screenwriter Alyssa Hill, an inherently chilling story about evil hiding within ordinary American life is done in by an uneven cast and script that connects too many dots.

In “The Housewife,” Naomi Watts plays Hermine Ryan, a woman who bakes delicious cookies for the church bake sale, keeps a spotless house in Queens, and has dinner ready when her American husband comes home from work. It’s 1964, after all. But when young hotshot New York Times reporter Joseph Lelyveld (Tye Sheridan) gets a tip from famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, we soon learn that the tidy Ryan household is built around a horrifying lie.

Watts is undoubtedly the best part of the film. In a carefully constructed performance, she titrates Hermine’s darkness with precision, unmasking her in sequential bits that make one’s throat tighten. With each swipe of dust, bedsheet smoothed, and portion of meatloaf served, Watts deftly embodies the palpable psychological and physical tension at work within her.

Visually, there’s a recurring language of muted blues and grays. Things feel drab, cloudy, and, well, emotionally blue. Hermine first appears wearing baby blue, and much of her palette moves through blue, black, and gray. There are clear exceptions, though, like when she becomes an American citizen, Hermine enters a dress shop in her typically muted color story and emerges in a striking red dress, taking a victory stroll out of the store that cements her full entrance into the all-American housewife role she has been endlessly performing.

Costume designer Anette Cseri’s work is one of the film’s central time-travel devices as Montreal stands in for 1960s New York City. In a courtroom scene, Hermine wears a fluffy white angora hat and matching cardigan, a look Cseri pulled from an archival photograph of the real Hermine hiding her face from cameras.

Where Cseri’s costumes trust suggestion, the film’s broader visual language often does not. When Joseph finally publishes his exposé on the Ryans, the sun literally shines on him like a spotlight as he stands outside the newsroom in a full hero’s pose. It speaks to the film’s tendency toward the heavy-handed.

While Watts is doing precise, carefully moderated work, the actors and filmmaking around her often seem incapable of the same subtlety. The supporting characters can feel more like caricatures than real people. It adds up to a film that screams the obvious while speeding past its most interesting narrative hook. And one carefully calibrated lead performance simply can’t overcome an uneven script and an ensemble prone to overacting.

Perhaps the biggest misstep with “The Housewife” is how quickly it speeds past its most interesting narrative turn. For the first third of the film, we are led to believe that Russel Ryan (Luke Evans), Hermine’s American husband, is the Nazi in question and that Hermine simply doesn’t know. In the framed photograph Joseph sees during his first visit to the Ryan home, Russel even sports a not-too-subtle Hitler-esque mustache.

But eventually Joseph’s pen trains on Hermine. It is a genuine twist. What had been his turmoil over the presumed innocence of his maternal stand-in suddenly becomes its nightmarish opposite. Yet we barely have a moment to metabolize the revelation before the film jumps headlong into bringing her to justice. Narratively, the movie trips over its own steps. Such a key turn should fundamentally destabilize everything that came before it, but instead it falls strangely flat.

“The Housewife” wants viewers to become swept up in Joseph’s moral crisis. He is a young reporter with a distant relationship to his own family who sees in Hermine the maternal figure he longs for, only to be forced to confront the fact that she has committed heinous crimes against humanity. Sheridan is mostly one-note when he isn’t sliding into melodrama.

The film also makes sure we understand that Joseph is Jewish, though not religiously observant, and the son of a New York rabbi, turning even his identity into another explanation for why this investigation matters to him. It’s another way screenwriter Alyssa Hill insists upon connecting dots for us rather than trusting this real-life story to do its own work.

There are many films about the Holocaust, but far fewer about this particular aftermath, when survivors and perpetrators could be living ordinary lives in close proximity to one another, sometimes in the same American city. Set twenty years after World War II, “The Housewife” is most fascinating when it allows us to sit with that alarming reality. Through, for example, the character of Rachel Berger (Lena Olin), a Holocaust survivor forced to confront someone who committed atrocities against her and her family. Olin allows the history itself to carry much of the scene’s emotional weight. But even here the film feels predictable. Once Berger says she does not want to testify, there is little doubt that eventually she will.

The narrative horror of Nazis in hiding alongside the people they tortured is already obvious. Yet the movie curiously fatigues itself, and the viewer, trying to tell us just how sickening it all is. It is particularly frightening when Hermine’s hatred, buried almost literally in a box at the back of her kitchen cupboard, finally comes to the surface. Watts makes that shift work because she has spent so much of the film holding something back. At times, though, it feels as if she is performing a monologue in one movie while everyone else is fumbling through another.

Ultimately, “The Housewife” never fully lands. The story of the Ryans has enough complexity to drive the film somewhere interesting; it didn’t need so much underlining. Watts understands that, allowing Hermine’s menace to emerge incrementally rather than announcing it. If the rest of the film had trusted its extraordinary true story as much as she does, it might have landed with greater force.

Grade: C+

“The Housewife” premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.