Suburban couple Caitlin and Miguel Morales hire seemingly sweet Polly to take care of their newborn baby. But Polly's true motives have little to do with singing lullabies — much to the horror of...
The 1992 iteration “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle”, not to be confused with the 1917 silent film, has been heralded as this tense tale of household terror when the nanny from hell goes amok because of an incident in her past involving a woman whom she perceives as ruining her husband's life. Me personally, suspension of disbelief was too demanding for my tastes but the tension was exquisite and made the inevitable full circle conclusion that much sweeter.
Try not to act surprised when I say this loose remake handles that with no aplomb or finesse. It’s hardly worth the price of admission.
With the premise walking a retrograde line, I’m glad they kept the core idea from its predecessor, at least—maleficent nanny working her way into the normal nuclear family to quite literally detonate it from the inside out to settle a personal score—but does so by completely turning the structure inside out, which should've worked to its benefit. The possibilities were endless for them to take on fear of motherhood and the loss of feminine autonomy in 2025 when tradwives are back and the current administration is wielding a lot of legislative force in favor of pushing women back into the kitchen. And that’s on top of picking apart the messy thin line between sanity and insanity when hurt women hurt women. Alas…..it was not to be. Many reviewers have made this comment already but it bears repeating because it’s true; it truly did feel like a Lifetime made-for-TV movie in the worst way. It’s bad enough having the final product be this assemblage of countless suspicion/paranoia cliches in a boilerplate frustrating-gaslighting plot, further restrained by its source material too, but I think the tipping point is how uniformly….
…barren the experience feels.
Laughably hokey with each escalation softening the necessary sense of propulsion a thriller like this would operate at, Micah Bloombergs script doesn’t go too far with keeping the setup of the original film without being a complete copy because of how tame it is, picking out any of the prickly salaciousness that had made Hanson’s film so worthy of discourse and not differentiating itself from the flashier, melodramatic psychological thriller it may have been intending to subvert. It’s toothlesswith the neutral aftertaste of a room-temperature La Croix— inoffensive middle ground with thematically lazy character development and plot mechanics that only just pushes past tedium into being genuinely aggravating when you realize its another endless variation of the “wife/mother defending her happy home against the twisted interloper” subgenre. And it doesn’t even do it well enough to stand out.
Only two fundamental new developments are made—poking at the giant class divide between Polly and Caitlin who grew up in radically different environments that shaped them and both lead women being made either gay or bisexual to further that divide. The pieces are there for this story to follow through on a repressed bisexual woman who yearns for the love of someone whose broken intentions are self-destructive WHILE molding those sharp edges around the blueprints of the original….but those are the two most damning indictments on top of the already vast litany of promises the film simply can’t keep. Staid energy is everywhere since the film doesn’t revel in the absurdity of the situation, the muted slow burn and distinct lack of playfulness means its focus remains loose before the real “thrills” pick up in the last 30 minutes, and for a reimagining of a campy story that clearly has as much sympathy for the antagonist as its protagonist, there’s this dissonance in them both to where the specifics of BOTH their personalities and motivations push crudity to where you don’t quite buy it.
Though, its not for lack of trying.
Forgive me for blanking on my extensive vocabulary but competent is all that comes to mind when discussing Michelle Garza Cervera’s direction. Her directorial eye and framing choices paint every scene directly like she’s exploiting our expectations, which speaks to more thoughtful intentions toward understanding the visual language of paranoia….but deploying it with mechanical precision rather than intuition and it doesn’t feel entirely by choice. It’s a classic case of a director’s vision fighting itself not to go down easy when forces out of her control designed it to and the end result feels like flattened, pricy drink coaster.
The contemporary, spacious yet enclosed production design by Kay Lee is intriguing on paper. The hermetic, clean look of Caitlin’s apartment boasts this reflective, peer-through-your-soul, outside-looking in slickness meant to represent a gilded cage and the airiness of it hints at a vacancy that reflects the boring, uncreative designs of modern homes for people in their tax bracket….which is fine. But that’s literally the only visual stand out and even that impresses only on paper; everything else about the set design is uninspired, cookie cutter and as thin as the nanny’s facade with lifeless spaces contributing nothing to the film's mood and a drab aesthetic that doesn’t yield much where atmospheric tension should flourish. Hell, the atmosphere in general feels like a giant contradiction—straining for intimacy and claustrophobia while maintaining clinical distance without actually evoking an aura.
And that’s just with the locations and set design; the entire presentation as a whole feels crippled of actual verticality to settle for the oddest or most mundane visual choices you’d expect to get pulled out of a clueless executive’s asshole. Take Jo Willems’s cinematography; while technically precise in its focus, his movement feels sterile to the point of draining the life from every frame and the intention behind using the Helios lens gets lost on me when every daylight scene doesn’t look as strategic or potently beautiful as The Batman or Dune (unfair comparison I know, but its more distracting here). While I can only just make peace with the desaturated color palette given the tone of the story, the flat lighting and overlapping blur effect took no time at all to bother me.
Julie Monroe’s editing barely escapes unscathed but again, its not the most interesting.
Pacing comes equipped with a 105 minute runtime that looks built to tackle more meatier material, only for it to stretch on like a chewing gum looking after its lost its flavor. Nearly all of the costumes are unfortunately unremarkable and neither the scope or scale if this environment paint the situation as either our lead characters feeling trapped. Unfortunately, they’re not nearly as disappointing to me as the tone. Don’t get me wrong, removing the soapiness of the original film is admirable but what’s the point of committing to the bit if it quickly grows too timid for what the story calls for? If they didn’t want to resort to the original film’s campiness, they should’ve either went all in on hardcore psychological terror or play around with the theatrics of it; this noncommittal approach—neither embracing camp nor fully committing to psychological horror—saps away what should have been nail-biting suspense operating on multiple levels.
That being said, the tension never manifested those sharp edges to get that far anyway, the whispery synth score from Ariel Marx and gloomy vocal tracks reach their emotional zenith halfway through before gradually fading into forgettable background noise, the sound design meets mostly basic industry standards without distinction while a few minor exceptions can be made in certain scenes, and while the film certainly earns its R-rating, it does so by the skin of its teeth—offering just the bare minimum threshold of profanity, violence and gory imagery to pass as such.
I feel sorry for the cast here; most of them appear stranded in a creative desert, their performances as flat and lifeless as abandoned mannequins while the leads struggle valiantly against the tide. Most of their sporadic dialogue is stilted, made worse with monotone and nearly all the characters, even the ones with brief sparks of two-dimensionality, are either overwhelmingly lackluster, completely forgettable or skin-feelingly annoying and there is no in-between.
Bless Maika Monroe for really trying to lean into this variation of Polly as both cold-blooded and vulnerable; she clearly tried to adapt for this role but she has very little of the flaming menace of Rebecca DeMornay in the original nor the right balance of appealing and sinister. Mary Elizabeth Winstead is the only one of the cast consistently up to par with what the material delivers, barely balancing post-partum depression and a careful constructed facade with much better poise than this movie deserves.
For a well-respected proverb meant to highlight the profound and often underestimated power of women and motherhood to influence and guide society by raising the next generation, this “Hand that Rocks the Cradle” just felt like it was being done for the sake of doing it. Any potential thought-provoking commentary on motherhood, and the typical drivel on being unable to outrun your past is lost in the fray of a half-baked plot, glacial pacing and the lack of suspense dulling this thriller’s hook.
