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!
