Obsessed with the Babysitter (Strawberry Productions, Sioux City Pictures, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched the Lifetime “premiere” movie, Obsessed with the Babysitter, which had some interesting aspects but I’m finding myself getting more bored with Lifetime movies because they’re cut so close to a formula and the formula is becoming just plain dull. The biggest point of interest in this one is that the character with the titular obsession with his babysitter is Dr. Adrian Cartwright (Simon Haycock, a basically attractive British actor who’s going to be difficult to cast because he’s tall, skinny and has an odd-looking face – another Adrian Brody “type”), a psychiatrist who is continuing his mother’s research into family dynamics. I suspect writers Joseph Nasser (story) and Helen Marsh (script) were, shall we say, “influenced” by Michael Powell’s marvelously kinky 1959 film Peeping Tom, in which a young man was driven homicidally crazy by a psychologist father who used him as the guinea pig in his experiments and extensively filmed the proceedings. I love stories in which psychologists use their expertise to manipulate other people and build cults around them (before he started the Black Dahlia/Big Nowhere/L.A. Confidential/Jazz sequence for which he’s best known James Ellroy wrote a quite good and blessedly short book called Because the Night with just that premise — a psychologist uses his knowledge of human behavior to start a cult – which could make an interesting film), and had this movie focused more on that it would have been considerably better than it is.

As for the babysitter he’s obsessed with, she’s Elaine “Lainie” Davidson (Kristen Vaganos), and she’s an aspiring dancer who had a bad fall while preparing for an audition for a New York ballet company the year before. She’s healed enough to dance again, but she’s psychologically scared of being injured again and permanently losing her chance to be a dancer. Just in case we might miss the point that dancing is all she’s ever wanted to do as a career, we see her with a T-shirt reading “Dance Mania!” She also has a boyfriend she practices with, Damon (who’s actually billed on imdb.com under the preposterous name “Castle Rock” and is quite cute in a twink-ish way, though I like ’em with a bit more hair on their bods and meat on their bones; also the writers and director Brian Skiba tease us with the expectation of a soft-core porn scene between him and Vaganos but don’t deliver), who quite frankly seems to be a better and more adventurous dancer than his co-star (as does the Black dancer who partners her on her first professional performance – am I really spoiling anything when I say she gets through her tribulations O.K.?). Adrian Cartwright has a wife, Sofia (Elina Madison), and two daughters, Mackenzie (Lyla Emerson Booker) and Lilly (Hannah Aniela), but they’re not really his: they’re Sofia’s kids by a previous relationship, and he comments that before she met him she was drawn to destructive men. The real father of Mackenzie and Lilly never shows up, but their grandmother, Molly Dalton (Michelle Miller-Dey), does and demands custody of the girls after Sofia dies.

Adrian actually killed Sofia after plying her with wine and drugs, but he faked the scene to make it look like suicide and the cops – including lead detective Munro (Raquel Rosser, who does the Mariska Hargitay thing of wearing her badge on her belt right next to her tight-jeans-clad crotch) – buy it. Adrian Cartwright has become so obsessed with Lainie he’s determined to make her the perfectly submissive wife and mother in his family, with Mackenzie and Lilly as “their” daughters. He uses his psychological influence on her to try to get her to give up dancing – a plot twist which reminded me of the 1944 film The Climax, an interesting reversal of the plot premise of Svengali in which a master hypnotist (Boris Karloff) used his power not to build an untalented singer into a great diva but to wreck the career of someone with real talent — and when that fails he launches a murderous attack on Lainie’s boyfriend Damon (ya remember Damon?) after his previous attempt to break them up by forging a love note to him from another woman didn’t work. Adrian kills at least one other victim, a nosy Asian-American neighbor named Hank (Dom Huynh) who was getting too close to the truth about Sofia’s death. He’s also got the place she shares with Damon, as well as every room of his own home, bugged with surveillance cameras; just how he accomplished this the writers never bother to explain. Apparently we’re just supposed to accept it as a “given” in today’s Lifetime movies that anyone can bug anyone else quickly, easily and with no fuss and no obstacles to getting into their homes. (Damon is at least established as the sort of person who never locks his doors.) Adrian’s retro view of male-female relations is reflected by his retro lifestyle, including the beautifully maintained 1950’s Buick convertible he drives (this gorgeous black car with a white top and trimmings practically becomes a character in itself!) and the old-fashioned 1960’s 8 mm camera with which he films his, Elaine’s and the kids’ interactions, supposedly to continue his mother’s great study which he claims may be published by the New England Journal of Medicine.

The climax is a weird game of hide-and-seek in his house, in which like many people in stupid movies Lainie and the kids try to flee the danger they’re in by going up – and Lainie faces a leap from the top of Adrian’s two-story house to the ground below. Remembering Anton Chekhov’s dictum that if you establish a pistol in act one it has to go off in act three, we’re convinced that Lainie is going to break her leg again falling off Adrian’s house while she’s in a death struggle with him (he catches her on the roof and tries to bring her inside, but she resists), thereby surviving but bidding adios to any hope of a dancing career. We assume either that will happen or she’ll kill Adrian in the fall while surviving it herself, but instead they both survive and her leg is sufficiently intact she’s able to flee the scene until the cops, alerted by her previous 911 call, arrive and arrest Adrian. In this script Chekhov’s pistol duly went off but the bullet turned out to be a dud! In the end Lainie gets not only the dancing job in New York but a chance to move there as the kids’ live-in governess for their grandma, who ends up with them. In a way Obsessed with the Babysitter is more annoying than other Lifetime movies because the premise is more provocative than usual and could have been developed into a really powerful and multidimensional story (as Michael Powell and Leo Marks did in Peeping Tom and Alfred Hitchcock and Joseph Stefano did a year later in Psycho – a film that owed a lot to Peeping Tom even though it was in black-and-white instead of color and the parent who drove Norman Bates into homicidal madness was his mother, not his father); instead Skiba, Nasser and Marsh went for the easy way out at almost every story turn and frustrated the abilities of a quite good cast, Simon Haycock in particular, who despite the script’s many improbabilities makes us believe in Adrian as a character whose surface charm hides depths of manipulativeness and evil.