TIFF Review: Naomi Watts in The Housewife

Back in 2016, Alyssa Hill’s post-Holocaust script, The Housewife, about the discovery and extradition of Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan from America to West Germany for war crimes, landed on the Blacklist. Ten years later, it has finally been made into a feature film, with Canadian filmmaker Ben Shirinian (best known for music videos, including some for the National Ballet of Canada), marking his feature directorial debut. Watching The Housewife, one can’t help but think this film would have been better off made a decade ago, when America’s immigration policies were less in the spotlight than they are today. The film gets caught up in a meta web of hypocrisy that is impossible to ignore.

Naomi Watts stars as Hermine, who is first presented as an Austrian immigrant excited to pass her American citizenship exam. Watts is consistently the best thing about The Housewife, giving a layered performance that doubles down on manipulation and presentation, as Hermine attempts to build safety from behind her perfect housewife façade. When New York Times reporter Joseph Lelyveld (Tye Sheridan) knocks on the door of her tidy Queens home, she is all gracious, warm welcome. She dresses well, if a bit out of date, she bakes cookies, attends church, cares for a sick neighbor, and makes perfect, homey dinners for her hardworking but silent husband, Russell (Luke Evans). Hermine is Frau Betty Crocker, content in her modest, middle-class American life, doing normal middle-class American wife things like sewing, cooking, cleaning, lovingly caressing her Nazi medal…

Joseph is brought to Hermine’s door on assignment, as the New York Times receives a tip from Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal that a Nazi is living in the outer boroughs. It’s 1964, twenty years since the war, but Nazis are still being tried with gusto in West Germany. Joseph goes to investigate, working with immigration officer DeVitio (Michael Imperioli), who approved Hermine’s citizenship and is now embarrassed to have let a Nazi into America. Joseph initially believes that the silent Russell is the Nazi-in-hiding. But when Russell finally speaks, revealing an unmistakable Queens accent, Joseph realizes it’s picture-perfect Hermine who has remade her post-war life in America.

The American government, meanwhile, doesn’t want a spotlight on Hermine or her extradition proceedings, because post-war America was a goddamned sieve and a lot of Nazis got in (many by way of Operation Paperclip, on purpose and with full knowledge of the government sponsoring their new lives). In the midst of the space race, no one wants the public looking too closely at all the post-war immigrants from Germany and Austria.

The first half of The Housewife is quite good, setting up Hermine’s cover and then tearing it down over one of her beautiful dinners. And because Joseph is so charmed by Hermine at first, he struggles with whether or not to even publish the story. But of course he does, and from there, The Housewife unravels, falling apart on two points. One is internal to the story, with an unnecessary streak of melodrama that adds nothing to the film. 

Particularly in the back half, The Housewife is very conventional and pushes too many buttons to manufacture emotion that isn’t really necessary in a story already generating plenty of feelings, just by way of being about a Nazi trying to get away with being a Nazi. One moment punches through the noise, when Lena Olin shows up as a concentration camp survivor, recounting Hermine’s evil for the extradition court. It’s a gutting, grounding moment that reminds us why it’s important to punish people like Hermine, even if it’s a little embarrassing for America, having given her citizenship and all (her extradition is the first of an American citizen for war crimes).

But the other problem is external to the film itself, and that is America’s current state of immigration, which is a humanitarian disaster of its own. The Housewife wants the moral clarity of a Holocaust drama, in which the bad guys are cut and dry, and the need for punishment righteously justified by the scale of the horrors perpetrated during the war. But when America is currently perpetrating fresh horrors, using immigration and deportation as weapons of choice, that clarity is harder to achieve. A sharper, better version of The Housewife would draw parallels between then and now, but Shirinian shies away from any such comparisons, letting The Housewife become a conventional legal thriller that asks whether or not the fog of war is enough to justify Nazism (answer: no).

Naomi Watts is the film’s saving grace. Her performance is masterful, yet it never feels like she is reaching for sympathy for the devil she’s portraying. At one point, Hermine rails against the Americans trying her, because what do they know about war, having not fought one on their shores in more than a century? It’s an especially pointless argument once Lena Olin’s character shows up as a witness to Hermine’s barbarity and cruelty. There is simply no excuse beyond “evil” for Hermine’s actions, and she is unwilling to express any remorse for her part in the Holocaust. The Housewife is almost interesting, but in the end, save for Naomi Watts’s performance, it settles for mediocrity.