The Housemaid

The Housemaid is Lionsgate’s 2025 psychological thriller directed by Paul Feig, starring Sydney Sweeney, Amanda Seyfried, and Brandon Sklenar. Written by Rebecca Sonnenshine and based on Freida McFadden’s 2022 novel, the film follows Millie Calloway, a young woman with a troubled past who becomes the live-in maid for a wealthy family whose household hides dark secrets. It premiered in New York City on December 2, 2025, opened in U.S. theaters on December 19, and grossed $398.8 million on a $35 million budget to generally positive reviews, with a sequel in development from Feig and Sweeney.

SCANable supported the film’s visual effects with high-resolution character scanning, capturing precise likeness, geometry, and texture detail of the cast. These photogrammetric captures enabled accurate digital doubles and seamless VFX integration, helping maintain realism and continuity throughout the film.

Built to a vendor’s specification

A scan that is accurate and unusable has failed.

Every visual effects facility runs its own conventions: units, up-axis, polygon budgets, UV layout rules, texture resolutions and naming, file formats, directory structure. An asset that ignores them arrives and then sits in a queue while somebody converts it, which costs exactly the time the scan was meant to save.

The specification is agreed before capture, not after. Character assets are built through retopology, UV layout, and texturing to the topology the vendor asked for — clean edge loops where a face has to deform, sensible density elsewhere — and named so the receiving pipeline can ingest them without a translation step.

A one-time cost with a long tail

A capture session is a one-time cost and a long-lived asset.

Reshoots happen. Additional photography happens. Marketing asks for material nobody planned for. Sequels get made, often years later, by which point a performer has changed and the set no longer exists.

A properly archived scan library answers all of those without bringing anyone back in. It is a dimensioned record of what the cast and the sets were at the moment the film was shot, and it stays valid regardless of what happens afterward. Productions that treat scanning as a per-shot expense tend to pay for it twice.

Character scanning on a film with almost no visible effects

A psychological thriller does not advertise its visual effects, which is precisely why they are demanding.

The work is cleanup, continuity, small replacements, and shots that need a performer somewhere the performer was not. None of it announces itself, and all of it is examined by an audience watching faces in close-up for the entire running time.

A digital double in that context has to be indistinguishable, not merely convincing. There is no motion blur, no explosion, and no distance to hide behind.

Detail budgets for close-up work

How much resolution an asset needs is decided by how close the camera gets, and a film built on close-ups sets that bar high.

Texel density has to be uniform across a face, because a soft patch on one cheek is more noticeable than a uniformly softer scan. Geometry has to be dense enough to carry the shapes that read at that distance — the bridge of the nose, the edge of the lip, the way an eyelid sits — without becoming a mesh nobody can animate.

Getting that balance right is a decision made at capture, not in cleanup. Our cyberscanning arrays are configured for the range the asset will actually be seen at, and our Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios bring that setup to the production rather than asking cast to travel.

More feature film scanning is in the portfolio, or see the full service list.