by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago I watched an oddball Lifetime movie called Nanny
Seduction, in which virtually the only
novelty or suspense value was attempting to guess which set of Lifetime clichés writer Marcy Holland would
tap to resolve her next plot point. The film was directed by Emily Moss Wilson
(Lifetime, to their credit, has given a lot of opportunities to women
directors, and sometimes, as with Christine Conradt and Vanessa Parise, they’ve
shown real talent that deserves a shot at major theatrical features; alas,
Emily Moss Wilson is hardly in their league) and stars Wes Brown and Austin
Highsmith (a woman named “Austin”?) as Ben and Kara Turling, who six months
before the film began took on the formidable challenge of adopting an
eight-year-old girl, Riley (Lauren Goluzzi in what’s far and away the best
acting job in the film!), even though she’s relentlessly antisocial and
virtually catatonic. The reason they’ve done this is that Kara herself grew up
in foster homes and never got over the sheer trauma of being moved around so
much and never being able to settle down in one home environment, with one set
of parents, that could make her feel like she belonged. She’s determined to
make sure no one else has to go through that, so she singles out Riley and
gives her a home. There’s a scene between her and Ben in which she says she’s
forgiven him for the “mistake” he made a year ago — and if you’ve seen more
than two Lifetime movies in your life you’re instantly aware that the “mistake”
he made was an affair.
The plot kicks off when the live-in nanny the Turlings
have been using, a grandmotherly Latina, announces that she’s leaving because
her daughter has just borne her a grandchild of her own, and so Kara has to
hire a replacement. We see her interviewing three people, two women and a man,
and she ultimately hires the blonde woman even though her references were
shakier than those of the black-haired woman — only when the blonde takes the
job she spends most of the day talking on her cell phone about her friends and
their boyfriends, including mentioning one of her female circle who’s
“screwing” a particular guy. Then she realizes her possible faux pas of having said that in Riley’s presence and turns to
her, saying, “You don’t know what that means, do you?” “I do,” says Riley — the
first words we’ve heard her speak all movie. While all this has happened the
would-be nanny burns the sandwich she was frying for Riley, Riley refuses to
eat it, but we see the nanny carefully turn off the stove burner — only a
mysterious stranger sneaks into the house (apparently neither the Turlings nor
anyone they’ve let into the house has ever heard of door locks, since intruders
seem to breeze in and out of there all movie without so much as a
by-your-leave) and turns the burner back on, starting a kitchen fire it looks
like the nanny started by her negligence. So Kara lets her go and instead hires
the dark-haired candidate, Alyssa (Valerie Azlynn), who turns out to have an
agenda. Given the ample supply of Lifetime clichés to motivate the psycho
nanny/neighbor/teacher/caregiver/whatever, it’s not too surprising that the one
Marcy Holland picks is that Alyssa is Ben Turling’s former affair partner,
though it was just a one-night stand and Ben didn’t recognize her because the
night they did it, her hair was blonde. Of course, Ben couldn’t care less about
her — to him she’s just a “mistake” he made one night and which he wants his wife
to forgive (though there’s a neat touch in Holland’s script that Alyssa’s
coming on to him makes him hornier for his wife), but to her he’s the great
love of her life and she’ll stop at nothing to get Ben away from Kara so she
can marry him and she, Ben and Riley can be a “family.”
Since she’s the psycho
villainess of a Lifetime movie she naturally does what virtually all psycho
villainesses in Lifetime movies do if their victims have kids: she kidnaps
Riley and takes her to a yellow house in the country, the home in which she
herself grew up. Fortunately, a drawing of the house Alyssa left behind gives
Ben the clue he needs to find it, only when he and Kara drive there — and Kara
hides out of sight in their SUV because Ben is going to try to lure Alyssa out
by pretending to be ready to leave his wife for her — Alyssa has a gun, and
it’s touch-and-go for a while before the police arrive, Alyssa is dispatched
(though I’m conflating this one with The Wrong Neighbor so much I can’t for the life of me recall whether
she’s captured alive or killed, and if the latter, by whom) and Ben, Kara and
Riley reconciled. Also, through much of the movie we’ve been given a red
herring — Riley’s birth mother, Vanessa Shaw (Erin Cahill), who also has been stalking the Turlings, though not because
she’s after Ben (I had thought it might turn out that Ben was actually Riley’s
birth father,but screenwriter Holland fortunately didn’t take us there) but because she simply wants to see Riley: she lost
custody because her chronic alcoholism was leading her to neglect Riley, but
now that she’s clean, sober and working, she wants, if not full custody, at
least some involvement in Riley’s
life — but in the end Vanessa turns out to be (relatively) innocent and she and
the Turlings reach a modus vivendi
that allows Vanessa to see Riley and be part of her growing-up. At least
Holland didn’t pull the trick of a sinister open-ended “surprise” ending like
the writers of The Wrong Neighbor,
Jeffrey Schenck, Peter Sullivan and Robert Dean Klein, did, but Nanny
Seduction is still pretty much a
to-the-pattern Lifetime piece with little (aside from Lauren Gobuzzi’s amazing
performance as Riley — it’s one of those shows in which you admire the child
actor while at the same time wondering what long-term traumas are going to be
caused by whatever director Wilson had to pull to get it from her) to
distinguish or recommend it.
