TW: brief mention of sexual assault and suicide.
Claire Bartel (Annabella Sciorra) is a happily married woman expecting her second child.
After she is assaulted by her obstetrician (John DeLancie), she makes a complaint.
This leads to more accusations from other victims, which leads to the doctor committing suicide.
Emotionally bereft and financially ruined, his widow Peyton (Rebecca De Mornay) miscarries their child.
Seeking vengeance for her loss, Peyton takes on another identity and gets a job as a nanny for Claire’s new baby.
Slowly, Peyton worms her way into the Bartels’ lives, determined to destroy Claire and take away everything Peyton believes Claire stole from her…
A couple of years back I started reviewing Screen Gems’ run of thrillers starring black actors. Part of their appeal is that they are callbacks to the thrillers of the nineties, in which middle class white people have their world turned upside down by a villain.
The Hand That Rocks The Cradle might be a prime example of the form.
The key draw of the picture is Rebecca De Mornay as Peyton, the titular hand. De Mornay is perfectly cast.
De Mornay is a ‘cool’ presence - she is at her best at presenting a placid surface, whether as Tom Cruise’s girlfriend experience in Risky Business or as the lawyer in Guilty as Sin. I have not seen enough of her work so considering this a working assessment, but she seems to be at her best repressing. The one movie I have seen where the character was more open and exposed - Runaway Train - I found it hard to buy her.
Peyton is the polar opposite. A lot of the movie’s strength comes down to the way De Mornay keeps her character’s rage at a low simmer, like the way she stares down her husband’s attorney after he has run through the financial fallout of his demise.
There is a creepy minimalism to her performance that kept me on my toes.
While De Mornay is a fine antagonist, I really wanted to like this movie more. While there are some creepy moments, it never felt like the tension was ratcheting up.
The early scenes which precipitate the plot are disturbing, but the movie lacks a sense of danger.
Part of the problem is that I could not get invested in our heroes. There is something so pristine about the central family that I could not get onboard.
Part of it is I think the filmmakers have leaned too hard into making the protagonists likable and ordinary. It is important to this type of movie that the domestic environment is established as stable and morally sound, so that it can be upset and destroyed by the arrival of the villain.
The other aspect of it is that I never found the couple that interesting.
I could not work out why I was not engaged until Juliane Moore showed up as a family friend.
Her role is small but in only a few scenes Moore brings life to this cookie cutter world.
Every other character feels like they are on rails, but Moore feels like a human being - she is smart and funny, and feels more vulnerable in a way that is more nuanced and fleshed-out than any of the other characters. There is a weight and history to her performance that is sorely missed in the rest of the movie.
Nothing against the lead performers but the main couple is presented as so trusting and plain I was a little frustrated with how Peyton is able to insert herself into their lives.
The other element which turned me against the movie was the character of Solomon (Ernie Hudson). A learning impaired man who saves the day at the end, Solomon feels like a caricature from a different movie. Casting a non-disabled person never smells right, and the family’s slow turn toward recognising his worth feels like the worst kind of redemptive arc. There is a kernel of a great idea in how Peyton turns the family against Solomon, but he would need to be a character.
A movie about a disabled person trying to stop a villain who tries to gaslight people about them is a terrifying idea. But for it to work, it needs a character who is fleshed out and not just a saintly trope to make your main character feel good.
The Hand The Rocks The Cradle has some good qualities, but it feels too cookie cutter to truly worm its way into being genuinely scary. I might change my mind if I have kids, but on this viewing it felt like this movie left something on the table.
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