Monday, May 18, 2020

The Au Pair Nightmare (Indy Entertainment, Quint Pictures, Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I eventually watched a Lifetime “premiere” movie called The Au Pair Nightmare — originally shot under the title The Au Pair until someone at Lifetime realized few American audiences would know what an “au pair” is. According to Wikipedia, it’s actually someone who comes from another country to take a live-in position as a nanny and general housekeeper — which makes the title a misnomer because the central character, Taylor (Brytnee Rutledge — and I thought “Brittany” was an overly pretentious spelling of that first name! I hadn’t seen nothin’ yet!), merely travels from one part of the United States to another, a small town out in the middle of nowhere called “Mill Valley.” The place name threw me because I grew up near the real Mill Valley in Marin County, California, just across the Golden Gate Bridge north of San Francisco, and while it’s a small town it’s not as small — or as isolated — as the one depicted in the film. Taylor was attending college to become a teacher and was one year away from graduation when her fiancé Brad (Micah McNeil), who in the opening scene had taken her for a night walk and rigged the window lights of a local business to read “WILL YOU” and “MARRY ME?”, got killed in an auto accident when a drunk driver rammed into his car. Since we see this only in a dream in which Taylor relives it, it’s not clear whether she was in the car and survived or she just registered in her subconscious what she was told about how her boyfriend had died, but it traumatized her enough that she quit college and her older sister Kara (Elizabeth Saytah) and Kara’s husband Mark (Kurt Kubicek), with whom she’s been staying, tried to get her to stop grieving and get interested in life again. Taylor finally decides to sign up with an agency that places au pairs and ends up in the remote Mill Valley home of Dr. John Caleb (Tristan Thomas) and his forbidding wife Allesandra (Annie Heiss, top-billed). The Calebs have an argument over her — Allesandra, adopting a forbidding tone that’s about equal parts Mrs. Danvers and Lady Macbeth, says she specifically asked for someone with previous au pair experience but John, who’s cute and charming enough I was expecting this film to go the Jane Eyre route and pair up John and Taylor after Allesandra burned the house down and killed herself, insists on hiring her — especially once the couple’s daughter Emily (Gianna Gallegos) bounds down the stairs and she and Taylor bond immediately. 

Allesandra is supposedly writing a novel and in order to keep its contents private has an office door she keeps permanently locked, and they get their groceries delivered from the local market by Luke (Luke Valen), who though considerably younger-looking than Taylor (we’re told Taylor is 22, which is believable, but Luke looked about 17 to me), makes googly-eyes at her and she seems interested in reciprocating. Taylor notes some strange things about the way John and Allesandra are raising Emily; not only do they home-school her (of course in the SARS-CoV-2 era lots of parents are finding themselves forced to home-school their children!) but they literally lock her bedroom door from the outside when she goes to bed at night. (Around this time I joked, “Whom did Allesandra learn parenting skills from — Joan Crawford?”) John explains this is because Emily is a sleepwalker, but Emily denies this. Allesandra also has an obsessive hatred with the movie star “Brad Hardwick” (Trevor Donovan), star of Overnight Sensation and its three sequelae. (Imdb.com lists at least four real-life movies with “Overnight Sensation” in their titles, but the one most likely to have inspired Au Pair Nightmare writers Joe Russo, who also directed, and Chris LaMont was one from 2000 about amateur filmmakers trying to crash a big-name film festival with their low-budget production.) When Taylor brings a gossip magazine with Brad Hardwick on the cover to the Calebs’ home, someone tears off the cover; when she shows Emily a DVD of a Brad Hardwick movie Allesandra walks into the room and demands that Taylor not only stop playing the disc but destroy it. Taylor also notices that there are no photos of the family on the Calebs’ wall that include Emily, and from all those things — including Allesandra’s paranoid insistence that someone is trying to kidnap Emily and that’s the real reason they have to lock her in at night (though, like Joan Crawford’s kids working themselves loose from her torture devices, Emily has managed to figure out how to open the lock and sneak out), both we and Taylor come to the conclusion that movie superstar Brad Hardwick is Emily’s real father. 

Allesandra says that eventually — she says that she started an affair with him while he was in Mill Valley on a film shoot — and she’s not only convinced herself that Brad Hardwick is Emily’s father but that Brad has hired kidnappers to take Emily from her. She decides Taylor is one such merely because she’s seen the name “Brad” on her lists of phone contacts (of course the “Brad” listed on Taylor’s phone is simply her late fiancé, whose contact information she’s never bothered to delete) and she convinces John that Luke the cute delivery boy is really an agent of Brad Hardwick’s goon squad, so at Allesandra’s direction John kills him. The finale takes place at the Calebs’ home, after Taylor has secretly collected DNA material on all three Calebs and sent it to her sister Kara (ya remember Kara?) and her brother-in-law Mark (ya remember her brother-in-law Mark?), who have some job in the medical field and thereby can get a DNA test run. The tests prove [surprise!] that John Caleb, not some movie star Allesandra has probably never even met, is Emily’s biological father, and Allesandra originally made up the story about having had an affair with Brad Hardwick just to make John jealous (before that she’s told Taylor that she and John have an open relationship and Allesandra won’t mind if Taylor accepts John if and when he comes on to her — he does, but she doesn’t — but, as with a lot of real-life couples who attempt “open relationships,” there are limits on just how open she wants it to be, and I noted the irony that not long after she tells Taylor she won’t mind if Taylor has sex with her husband, she has a hissy-fit when she catches Taylor and the delivery boy flirting). But over time Allesandra not only kept up the story that she and Hardwick had had an affair but he was Emily’s real father, she began to believe it herself and assumed the existence of a conspiracy of people hired by Hardwick whom she and her husband had to kill so they wouldn’t lose their child. (Once again Lifetime’s writers are copying the Macbeth formula: a basically decent but weak man who’s driven to murder and other crimes by his strong-willed psycho wife.) 

It ends with Allesandra stabbing John to death, Taylor killing Allesandra in self-defense, and Kara and Mark picking up Taylor and for good measure taking custody of Emily, who’ll grow up alongside Mark’s and Kara’s own son Billy (Brady Bauer). (A sequel taking place 20 years later, with Emily and Billy having drifted into a psychologically if not biologically incestuous relationship, might be interesting!) Though the ending was a bit disappointing, The Au Pair Nightmare is actually a quite good Lifetime movie: director Joe Russo proves a master at both atmosphere and suspense, keeping the film exciting and moving it fast enough we don’t notice many of the plot improbabilities Russo and Chris LaMont put into their script. The three leads are especially well acted; Brytnee Rutledge gives Taylor enough toughness and initiative to make her more than yet another Lifetime “pussy in peril,” Annie Heise is formidable in the best Judith Anderson/Gale Sondergaard manner (it’s nice to know there’s someone alive today who can keep that tradition going!), and Tristan Thomas captures both John’s superficial charm and basic decency and the underlying weakness that makes him a patsy for his wife’s schemes. (He does a far better job creating a morally ambiguous character than Rory Gibson did in the similar, but less complex, role in Twisted Twin.) Despite the silly title (which might have led me to believe the film was about a nice couple who let a nasty au pair into their home to wreak havoc, not the other way around), The Au Pair Nightmare was quite gripping filmmaking and, if not a truly great thriller, at least one you don’t feel embarrassed to tell your friends you watched!