by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After that Lifetime showed a supposed “premiere” of a movie
called The Captive Nanny which
was not only a ripoff, but a ripoff of another film they “premiered” just two
weeks ago: The Au Pair Nightmare.
Both films are about a young, (relatively) innocent nanny (in The Au
Pair Nightmare the heroine had never taken
care of children professionally at all; in The Captive Nanny she’s an experienced nanny but has never worked as a
live-in before) who gets hired by a reclusive couple who keep all their doors
locked, sometimes lock their child in his/her room at night (the put-upon kid
was a girl in The Au Pair Nightmare
but is a boy here), and are paranoid that someone from a large organization
will find them out and kidnap their child. Both films feature the nanny
agreeing to take the live-in job after a relationship has just ended — though
in The Au Pair Nightmare the
heroine’s partner died in a car crash while in The Captive Nanny they merely broke up, mainly because while Chloe
(Karyann Moore), the heroine, ends her relationship with Rob (Willie Mellina)
after 10 years in which they’ve lived together as a couple but never got
married. It seems that even though Chloe is biologically incapable of having a
child of her own, she’s nonetheless determined to be a mother some way, so while she makes her living nanny-ing she’s
also making the rounds of adoption agencies and getting the usual third degree
from them about how two people who have highly time-consuming jobs will be able
to raise a kid. Rob has just got a hot new dream job running a fashionable new
night spot that presents live bands — he was a frustrated musician who still
wants a career in music, even if it’s only a behind-the-scenes one — but
Chloe’s latest frazzling experience with an adoption agency and the tough
questions she was getting from the hard-nosed Black woman she was dealing with
there leads Rob to decide that becoming a father, even by proxy, is way more of a commitment than he wants to make.
Chloe
takes the job as a live-in nanny for Michael (Michael Aaron Milligan) and Emily
(Austin Highsmith — a woman named Austin?) Brown. Chloe has one relative,
sister Stephanie (Ann Sonneville), who as the movie opens is visibly pregnant
with a child by her husband Kevin (the racially ambiguous Louis Robert
Thompson), a cop. (Gee, if he’s part-Black he can kill himself and be both the
perpetrator and the victim of police brutality — I know that’s a sick joke right now, but … ) Stephanie is
worried about Chloe taking a job with weirdos who lock their own son in at
night; she and Chloe also still have T-shirts that were souvenirs of the night
they went to a concert featuring a boy band called Blank Slate, whose leader,
Baz Martin (Jason Skeen), has gone on to a well-regarded solo career. Like the
similarly demented villainess of The Au Pair Nightmare, Emily Brown — or, as she used to be known, Chelsea
Collins — says she spent several years as Baz Martin’s live-in lover and wanted
to have his child, but he never wanted to be a father and eventually he broke
up with her, though this makes us suspicious that Tommy Brown (Judah Abner
Paul), the boy Chloe has been hired to take care of, is really Baz Martin’s
son. Like her opposite number in The Au Pair Nightmare, Emily becomes convinced not only that Baz is her
kid’s biological dad but Chloe is an operative sent by Baz to keep track of her
and ultimately kidnap Tommy. She’s convinced of that when she finds the old
Blank Slate T-shirt among Chloe’s effects, and meanwhile Chloe realizes that
the Browns lied to her when they said they’d never had a nanny before. They
did, her name was Sylvia, and they ultimately tortured and killed her when she
refused to reveal any information about Baz Martin because she didn’t have any.
But she recorded a statement on a ball-like computer drive and a separate flash
drive, announcing to anyone who might recover it some day that the Browns had
killed her and she was making this statement within minutes of the time she
knew the Browns’ machinations would finish her off for good.
Like the parents
in The Au Pair Nightmare, the
Browns seem to mimic the morals (or lack of same) of the Macbeths, with Emily
as the cold-blooded schemer and killer who pushes the basically decent but weak
Michael to join in her schemes and kill for her. Eventually Chloe discovers the
flash drive Sylvia left behind in one of Tommy’s old teddy bears, but Michael
catches her (though he doesn’t recover both drives) and the Browns lock her in
her room, announcing that they’ll give her food and water but only if she provides information about Baz Martin. It
turns out Baz Martin is actually giving one of those secret concerts that’s
advertised only on the Internet, and he’s doing that at the club managed by
(you guessed it) Chloe’s former boyfriend Rob. The climax occurs at Baz’s show,
which Emily has been able to crash by disguising herself as his wardrobe
person, and she comes in with a gun threatening to shoot him if he doesn’t
return to her (though we’re not sure if they were ever “together” in the first
place — the writers of The Au Pair Nightmare made clear that the wife had just made up a fantasy of having had an affair with a superstar and a child
by him, but The Captive Nanny
writer Julian Broudy never makes it clear one way or the other. Only after Baz
— showing a great deal more courage than common sense (one would have thought
he’d play along with this maniac until his security people could come and grab
her) — says even as Emily is holding a gun on him that he doesn’t love her, she
shoots but Chloe is there to knock her hand over so her shot reaches not Baz
but Emily’s husband Michael, so at the end Michael is dead, Emily is arrested
and in a postlude I didn’t believe in The Au Pair Nightmare and didn’t believe this time around either, Chloe
ends up taking custody of Tommy (ya remember Tommy?) and the final shot is of her, Rob (with whom she’s
reconciled) and Tommy out for a two-family outing with Stephanie, Kevin and the
child Stephanie finally had au naturel. (In the real world kids of psycho parents don’t end up in the custody
of their nannies: the police and courts would look for hopefully non-psycho relatives to take them.)
The person I really
felt sorry for in the making of The Captive Nanny — a title Charles said would have led him to expect
a Bad Seed-like story in which
the kid was the psycho and the
parents were locking him up to protect the rest of the world from him — was its
director, Amy S. Weber. One thing I admire about Lifetime is their willingness
to give women directors a shot, and some of the women who’ve made Lifetime
movies, notably Christine Conradt and Vanessa Parise, are perfectly capable of
handling theatrical features if only someone will give them the chance (and, of
course, assuming there ever are movie theatres again!). Amy S. Weber is a more
problematic case because, though she gets a possessory credit, she’s really
hamstrung by the two men on either side of her in the filmmaking hierarchy,
writer Broudy and producers John Mehrer and Danny Roth. Judging from her work
here, Weber is a potentially fine director especially capable of creating
Gothic effects in ordinary-looking modern-day environments, but she had to deal
with Broudy’s script and one wishes either Weber could have written the script
herself or got another woman to do it, since as it stands The Captive
Nanny is all too obviously a male fantasy
about a woman in distress, and for all her command of atmosphere Weber doesn’t
get the kinds of edgy, multidimensional performances Joe Russo got from the
actors playing all too similar characters in The Au Pair Nightmare.
