by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I was particularly interested in last night’s Lifetime
“premiere” movie, Nanny Killer, even
though the promos didn’t make it clear whether it was about a nanny who kills
or a person who kills nannies. It turned out to be the latter, and amazingly,
despite the silly title, it turned out to be one of the best things I’ve seen
on Lifetime recently, a gripping neo-Gothic thriller with a powerful script by
Christoff Bergeson, expertly directed by Jeff Hare. (Bergeson’s is a new name
to me but I’ve seen Hare’s work on Lifetime before, and since Ken Sanders is listed
as one of the producers one could readily imagine this story taking place in
the “Whittendale Universe.”) It’s true that Nanny Killer is derivative as all get-out — it’s basically Rebecca meets The Bad Seed, with admixtures of The Magnificent
Ambersons and The Spiral
Staircase — but it’s easy to accept
derivativeness when the modern-day filmmakers are as attentive to the virtues
of their sources and creative enough with how they rework and reshape the
material as they are here. Heroine Kate Jordan (Morgan Obenreder) is about to
go on summer break from college (presumably Whittendale, and we know from
previous movies in its universe how steep its tuition is!) and is worried about
how she’ll support himself when she can no longer work the school job (she says
she has two, but one is volunteer) that’s been keeping her alive and away from
the usual fate of Whittendale’s female students (selling themselves to rich men
as either prostitutes or mistresses to pay the school’s bills).
A friend of
hers says that there’s a rich guy in the wine country nearby who needs a
live-in nanny for his two kids for the summer, and when Kate meets said rich
guy, winery owner Edward Martell (David Rees Snell), she’s immediately hired
for a fee of $20,000 even though Edward warns her that she’ll be pretty much on
her own because he’ll be so busy during the summer that she shouldn’t call him
except in extraordinary circumstances. When Kate comes up to the Martell home I
immediately thought that if it had been me, I’d have looked at the outside of
the place and thought, “Cool! I’m going to be working in the Amberson mansion!”
Instead it’s more like Manderley since the first person Kate actually meets is
the housekeeper, Miss Grey (Danielle Bisutti), who’s wearing a severe old-style
woolen dress — she’s listed as “Ms. Grey” on the imdb.com dramatis
personae but I’m certain I heard “Miss” on
the soundtrack — and looks like she learned how to do the job from Judith
Anderson. She speaks all her dialogue in a sotto voce tone that just makes it that much more intimidating,
as she explains to Kate that among other things she’ll have the use of a
Martell-owned car (a Mercedes, as it turns out) for the summer. Then Kate meets
the children she’s supposed to be looking after and takes an immediate liking
to the younger one, daughter Rose (Violet Hicks), and an immediate distaste for
the son, Jack (Tucker Meek). Jack comes off as a male version of Rhoda from The
Bad Seed and Meek plays him very much like
Patty McCormick did in the Bad Seed
film, with an enigmatic expression and flashes of rage whenever he’s even
momentarily denied his way. Rose gives Kate her favorite doll, a raggedy thing
she calls “Josephine,” and Jack grabs the doll and shoots it full of arrows as
part of his archery practice — and narrowly misses both Kate and Rose on the
range. Jack shows himself a full-scale brat, and Miss Grey clearly favors him
over Rose, so much so that in the altercation between them over Jack’s arrows
it’s Rose whom Miss Grey punishes.
Kate tries to discipline Jack by grounding
him (though what kind of a punishment that is given that they’re already out in
the middle of nowhere is something of a mystery) and confiscating his laptop,
cell phone and video-game player. Jack sneaks into Kate’s room to grab these
items back and says he did so because the video game on the player was the last
gift he ever received from his mother, who died a year earlier. The incidents
start piling up, with Kate feeling more and more terrorized by Jack and
intimidated by Miss Grey’s protectiveness towards him, especially after someone
spikes her drink with some of the anti-anxiety medication she previously took
but stopped, with the result that on one of Edward’s rare homecomings she looks
drunk and falls down the stairs — though she insists Jack pushed her and
Edward, at least, saw Jack do so and therefore knew the truth. Then, behind a
drawer in her room, Kate finds a manila envelope which contains some papers
about Jack’s true background and a flash drive containing a video the mom,
Elizabeth (Elizabeth Leiner), recorded shortly before she died saying she was
in fear of her life and “there’s something wrong about Jack.” Kate asks Dr.
Bartlett (Bruce Katzman), the now-retired physician who delivered Jack, but
Bartlett puts her off and says the papers she discovered are just routine blood
tests. Eventually Dr. Bartlett has a change of heart and is willing to meet
with Kate and discuss the situation, but before he can do so Miss Grey, who’s
heard Kate setting up the meeting on the house’s landline phone (which is so
retro it still has a dial!), goes
over to Bartlett’s house and tases him, thereby short-circuiting his pacemaker
and not only murdering him but doing so in such a way that anyone examining the
body will just conclude he died of a heart attack. Kate eventually discovers
the body but that’s indeed what the authorities conclude, though she’s able to
show the paperwork to another doctor, a woman named Goldman (Monica Young).
In
a major plot hole in Bergeson’s otherwise well-constructed script, Dr. Goldman
is willing to violate all manner of doctor-patient confidentiality rules to
tell Kate the truth: Elizabeth Martell became suspicious as to whether Jack was
really her son because both she and Edward had AB-negative blood and Jack’s
blood type is O — and that’s impossible because AB is a recessive trait and
therefore a child born to two AB parents couldn’t possibly be O. Elizabeth had
a DNA test done on Jack and the result was that he was not the Martells’ son,
though someone (either Dr. Bartlett or Miss Grey) forged a fake result that
said he was. Kate tries to escape the Martell house with Rose but her car conks
out on her (was it deliberately sabotaged?) and she’s accosted by a handyman
named Joseph Donovan (Chris Devlin). They’d met before and he’d seemed
supportive, so Kate asks him for a ride — and instead he clubs her over the
head, knocking her out, and when she comes to she’s in the Martell house, she’s
tied to a chair and Miss Grey is explaining that she’s captured both Kate and
Rose and will make it look like Kate killed Rose and then took her own life out
of guilt. Miss Grey also tells us that Jack is her son (and, though Bergeson doesn’t specify it, we do get the impression that the handyman Joseph Donovan
is Jack’s biological father). She formerly led a licentious life and got
pregnant, and realizing that she’d never be able to raise a child, gave birth
and left the baby in a basket in front of the hospital — and just then
Elizabeth Bartlett started to give birth, but Dr. Bartlett, who’d been working
a 36-hour shift and was just tired, made a mistake that resulted in the
Bartlett baby’s death. Finding the baby on the hospital doorstep, Bartlett
decided to substitute it for the dead one, and Miss Grey cleaned and sobered up
and got the housekeeping job at the Martells’ so she could keep an eye on Jack,
cover for him when he got out of hand, and ensure that when Edward Martell died
Jack would inherit the Martell business and fortune.
Only Rose is able to fake
an escape, and ultimately there’s a confrontation in the Martells’ wine cellar
in which Edward, whose doubts about Jack had become strong enough that he cut
his business trip short and came home, learns the true story and clubs Miss
Grey, rescuing Kate and Rose. It ends with the summer over, Kate paid off,
Edward deciding to work from home from now on so he can mind his kids himself,
and Rose is living with him while Edward has sent Jack to the military school
he went to himself — only there’s a final chilling scene, a Skype call in which
Jack shows a painting he’s done at school of a happy family (Jack and Rose are
both aspiring painters and Jack is also described as a piano prodigy, though
the only pieces we hear him play are a Mozart duet with his sister and a solo
version of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” that sounds O.K. for a 10-year-old
but hardly at prodigy level), only when Edward says he’ll have to stay at the
military school instead of coming home, Jack goes into one of his nasty fits
and tears the painting up. Director Hare and writer Bergeson deserve credit for
not doing some of the obnoxious
things they could have done with this story, like pairing Edward and Kate up as
lovers the way the makers of the old TV show The Nanny did (though the late wife we see on her video looks
enough like Kate we could readily imagine Edward being attracted to Kate),
though the denouement might have
been more chilling if Miss Grey had plotted from the get-go to substitute her
son for the Martells’ one rather than that being one of those off-kilter
coincidences that power a lot of
Lifetime movies. But overall Nanny Killer is quite a bit better than the common run of Lifetime films, genuinely
Gothic and suspenseful, drawing on classic models but doing so in a fresh,
creative way that really leaves you in doubt as to how it’s all going to turn
out.
