The Hand That Rocks the Cradle

What wonderful memories that pop up in the frontal lobe at the same time as I read the title. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle from 1992. One of those forgotten thriller gems that I not only owned on VHS but also saw maybe a little too many times. I had one of those thriller periods in the mid-90s where Dangerous Desire, Ricochet, Breakdown, The Game, Cape Fear and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle... I owned them all and remember with great clarity how perfect Rebecca De Mornay was in the role of the psychotic babysitter Peyton. It was also none other than Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys) who was at the helm.

Now The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, like everything else, has been remade and the story is somewhat modernised in terms of the initial circumstances, but on the whole it is about the same premise. Stressed-out career mum hires a nanny to try and juggle her life as a star lawyer, but what starts out as a smart decision for her family's sake eventually turns out to be a complete nightmare. Nanny Polly is a murderous, manipulative ultra-bitch and using one clever method after another, she manages to turn the family against the stressed-out mum, create conflict and jealousy and brainwash her eight-year-old daughter.

The original is (as I said) a brilliant little thriller gem. Not least because the direction is sharp, the script well-written and Rebecca De Mornay is absolutely brilliant in the role of the psycho babysitter. In the remake, it's Longlegs star Maika Monroe who has drawn the lottery to play a psychotic killer and, to be honest, it doesn't work very well. While Mornay managed to convey an inherent rage pent up and controlled by a single-minded end goal, Maika doesn't manage to do much other than look perpetually sad and lost. For her part, she never becomes scary or threatening in the way that more or less defined the original, and there, of course, much of the film's threat falls flat.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead (10 Cloverfield Lane, Kate) plays the stressed-out luxury mum Caitlin and she does it very well, as always. I always think we should appreciate Winstead more because she is undoubtedly one of Hollywood's best female actors and has been for some time now. In this film, she does a good job of trying to balance the stresses of family life with her career, and does a very good job of expressing all that comes with failure. She is a bit neurotic but tries to hide it. She's a tad jealous, but masks it very well, and more than a little controlling about her own ideals and ideologies, which Winstead portrays with a softness and humanity that makes her mother the film's only believable character. The rest of this remake is substandard, unfortunately. It feels thin, flat and very typical of the genre.