“There should be a stop sign,” says Mary Elizabeth Winstead, looking off-camera, with eyes that glisten with portent, at the dangerous intersection in front of her house. It’s the kind of thing you shouldn’t say when you’re in a thriller movie. We’re just a few minutes into Michelle Garza Cervera’s remake of “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” and we already know someone’s going to get obliterated by a car. At least eventually.
Look, thrillers like “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” are not, typically, subtle affairs. Even Curtis Hanson’s blockbuster original, which starred Rebecca De Mornay as an unhinged nanny trying to steal her boss’s family, had brutal green house murders and climactic impalings on picket fences. Makes you think twice about how safe you are in the suburbs, doesn’t it?
It doesn’t help that the interloper genre — the one where conservative family units are attacked by evil outsiders — was picked up by basic cable and endlessly exploited over the last 35 years or so. Heck, Vivica A. Fox produced and co-starred in over two dozen films in the last decade, all in which a peaceful family accidentally gets involved with a dangerous maniac. And the pretty much all end with Fox saying things like “One thing’s for certain: she definitely picked the wrong cheer captain,” and “Sounds like to me, you picked the wrong life coach.” Those are both real, by the way. She’s made 28 of these “The Wrong…” movies and she still hasn’t done “The Wrong Nanny” yet, for reasons I cannot fathom.
Cervera’s “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” doesn’t just remake the 1992 movie, it also riffs on the Made-for-TV genre which came in its wake. The new film has all the cold slickness of a Lifetime production, with a color palette that’s half clinical and half funereal. It would look cheap if director of photography Jo Willems (“The Long Walk”) didn’t spike the movie with impressive compositions, proving every choice was intentional. “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” isn’t a cheap exploitation movie, it just knows how they operate.
This new film stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Caitlin, a lawyer and overprotective mother who glares at pesto sauce made with palm oil the way the rest of us glare at rat poison. She just had her second child and she’s struggling with all the stress. Fortunately, she just ran into a young woman named Polly, played by Maika Monroe, who studies child care and desperately needs a job. Sometimes everything works out. They’re probably going to be fine.
Except they’re not fine — whaaaaat?! — and things get out of hand. It starts slowly, with Polly feeding the kids sugar, what a monster, and builds and builds until Caitlin is completely paranoid and raving about how Polly is stealing her family. Revelations get revealed and, by the end, stop signs don’t work very well.
Micah Bloomberg’s script for “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” makes meaningful choices. The nanny in the 1992 version had a tragic supervillain’s backstory, right from the beginning, but the remake leaves Polly’s motivations vague for most of the film. So vague, in fact, it’s entirely possible the film is going to pull a fast one and change the plot entirely. Maybe this is a movie about an overprotective and repressed bisexual mother, regretting her life choices, yearning for the love of another woman, driven mad all on her own. Maybe Polly is the real victim here. Maybe.
“The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” is not as subversive as it hints. Eventually it settles into familiar thriller rhythms, but Cervera never falls into the trap of demonizing the villain. When all is finally revealed, the story turns out to be a tragedy about scarred women who should, in a better world, have been on each other’s side. It’s almost disappointing that there had to be violence at all, but it would have been harder to get that movie made. Besides, slipping intelligent messages into a thriller is preferable to doubling down on the “bad nanny” motif and arguing, intentionally or otherwise, that the nuclear family is sacrosanct, and everyone who challenges it is evil.
We can celebrate this remake of “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” for its new ideas, and the excellent performances by Winstead and Monroe, while still admitting it’s not a great thriller. The foreshadowing is heavy-handed, and not quite to the level of amusing camp. The conclusion is gnarly, kudos for that, but it’s slow in the middle and could have used some more spikes in tension and/or melodrama to propel the narrative forward. Ariel Marx’s incredible score deserves a special mention though: Marx keeps our anxiety cranked, even when the events on-screen don’t match her music’s panicky intensity.
Taken all together, it’s probably better to have a mixed-bag remake with real thought put into it than a superficial thriller retread of tired yuppie phobias. “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” may not rock, but hey, let’s give it a hand anyway.
