The yuppie-in-peril thriller, a multiplex mainstay throughout the late 80s and early 90s, tried to expose the vulnerabilities of our day-to-day, suggesting that danger could emerge from anyone and anywhere. It could be a co-worker (The Temp, Disclosure), a spouse (Sleeping With the Enemy, Dream Lover), a lover (Fatal Attraction, Don’t Talk to Strangers), a lodger (Pacific Heights, Single White Female), a parent (Mother’s Boys, Benefit of the Doubt), even a child (The Good Son, The Crush), a subgenre that insisted we maintain militant in spaces we’d assumed were safe.
One of the era’s most creepily effective examples was Curtis Hanson’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, because it played on a specifically awful fear for parents – that the person you’d entrusted to protect your child had a nefarious agenda. Rebecca De Mornay’s vengeful nanny became one of the more indelible villains of the 90s, the horror of an attractive, childless, blond woman wreaking havoc in suburbia striking fear into the hearts of settled cinemagoers across the world (it made $140m globally, a number that would be closer to $320m with inflation today). As the industry continues to plunder that decade (with everything from Buffy to Clueless to Urban Legend soon returning), it makes business sense to rock the cradle once again.
But attempts to re-energise this specific brand of movies haven’t paid off just yet with a failed TV remake of Fatal Attraction seducing no one and proposed revisits of Fear and Sleeping With the Enemy stalling at the announcement stage (the jury’s out on Apple’s forthcoming Javier Bardem-led Cape Fear reboot and an alleged Single White Female remake with Jenna Ortega). The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is mercifully not an eight-part series, and while it had originally been touted as a theatrical release, it’s wisely landing on Disney+ and Hulu instead (the market probably, sadly, wouldn’t be accepting of a domestic thriller with no A-lister attached at this moment, as even films with big stars such as Keanu Reeves, Julia Roberts, Dwayne Johnson, Channing Tatum and Jennifer Lopez have been flopping).
As deeply unnecessary 90s nostalgia plays go, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is one of the less egregious examples of late (the low bar was set and maintained by last year’s heinous new take on The Crow), a serviceably entertaining retread that manages to add enough tweaks without losing the basic pleasures of the original. In the update, Caitlin (Mary Elizabeth Winstead taking the baton from Annabella Sciorra) is a wealthy, heavily pregnant lawyer with a socially aware streak, doing good by offering free legal services to those in need. She helps Polly (It Follows target Maika Monroe) to fight a rent increase and the two later bump into each other, while Caitlin is in need of assistance with her newborn. Polly, who had expressed a desire to return to childcare, steps in and quickly becomes part of the family and, well, you probably know the rest.
We all know what’s to come, but that doesn’t quite excuse Monroe’s decision to play Polly with a far more obviously sinister bent from the outset, a choice that makes it harder to buy why Caitlin’s well-to-do mum would hire her (there’s something interesting in how far the liberal guilt of a privileged LA woman might lead to certain blind spots, but there’s not quite enough of that weaved in here).
Micah Bloomberg’s script finds some neat additions (Polly is gay and Caitlin is bisexual, meaning the sexual tension is between the women this time and it also leads to a fascinatingly knotty dinner table scene), but he can’t quite fix one of the perennial problems of films using this formula. Caitlin, like the many who’ve come before her, is a person with legitimate concerns who is met by disbelief from those who love her, promptly choosing the side of a stranger instead and while, as these films often do, she’s given a history of instability, it doesn’t quite justify the response. Polly’s motivation has also been given a refresh, and while it does help to fix one of the original’s issues (it’s one of many films that turns a grieving mother into a baby-stealing psycho), the specifics of her plan don’t hold up well to much scrutiny.
It’s this dissonance, with the serious and the silly jostling for space, that the film struggles with. Horror director Michelle Garza Cervera opts for the muted slow-burn (it’s a convincing argument for more studio work) and Winstead gives an earnest performance, the film for the most part existing in a recognisably grounded dramatic universe. But the plotting is often laughably hokey and its flashes of violence so distractingly grotesque that it’s never quite clear how seriously we should be taking any of this, a campy good time masquerading as prestige drama. Monroe’s performance is also stuck somewhere between the two extremes, solidly menacing but giving us none of the deliciousness that a far more confident, and ultimately scarier, De Mornay brought to the role. The cradle is still rocking, but it could do with a firmer hand.
