A young housekeeper named Sandra (Ilean Almaguer) has come to work for the wealthy Ash family –Kit (the main draw for many in this movie will be that Denise Richards is one of the leads ) and Preston (Richard Gunn) — who are still enduring the trial by media that has ensued when their last housekeeper mysteriously disappeared.

If you told me that director and writer Stuart Altman did this entire movie by using Chat GPT, I would be inclined to believe you. When Kit and Preston need to create a charitable group to get the heat off themselves, they call it The Foundation. First name, first pass, that’s good enough. A lot of this feels one take good enough as well, as if the big reveal was that Preston was a robot, I would be praising the acting chops of Gunn. As I am not doing so, I can spoil this for you and tell you that he’s made of wood not metal.

The thing that kept me watching was the location. This was sat the home of Robert Joshua in the Forest Glen neighborhood of Boardman as well as in the surrounding area of Youngstown, Ohio. I grew up less than half an hour away and am morbidly pleased to report that for several years in a row, Youngtown was the murder capital of the U.S.

Producer Paris Jones really knew how to sell this: “I have always been enamored by 90s thrillers, so when I was pitched the concept of The Housekeeper, a mix of all the 90s elements I love with a dash of Jordan Peele’s Get Out.” I don’t know about any connection to Get Out, but this totally would have been the kind of movie you’d settle to rent when everything was out at the video store.

Originally known as Among the Ashes, this movie feels so all over the place, even in its performances. Preston comes off as both sympathetic and abusive, sometimes in the same scene and I don’t mean that to say his role is complex. It’s misguided. He has a memory room no one is allowed to go in, which should make us feel for him when the reveal happens, but he also gets a lapdance from the other housekeeper before she’s killed. In a better movie, we may care for the twists and turns and wonder who to root for. Not here.

I did like the political commercials that The Foundation made. This feels like a movie that didn’t need the housekeeper of the title and could have just focused on the married rich people and their antics. It didn’t go far enough, though, to make us think they were truly evil as all the most well-off people are. Then again, if that was the movie, we wouldn’t get the cliche lines like, “You’ve really brightened up our home.”

Also: This has one of those “whoops, ran out of time” endings, defying expectations while not surprising me in the least.

You can watch this on Tubi.