The Nanny Murders (Reel One Entertainment, Cartel Pictures, Lifetime, 2020)

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

Last night at 8 p.m. I watched yet another Lifetime movie, The Nanny Murders, one of their more ambiguous title strategies (like The Girlfriend Killer and its follow-up, The Boyfriend Killer) that doesn’t make it clear whether it’s about a person who kills nannies or a nanny who kills other people. In this case, directed by Gigi Gaston (a former Olympic athlete who’s become a writer and director) from a script by Brooke Purdy and produced by our old friends, Cartel Pictures and Reel One Entertainment, it’s about a person who kills nannies. The person is Warren (Coby Ryan McLaughlin), a tall, charismatic, ultra-sexy (when he’s shown beside his own swimming pool wearing swim trunks and nothing else, I thought, “Hey, I’d do him and he wouldn’t have to drug me!”) superstar business consultant and celebrity writer of how-to-succeed business books with titles like Everything Has a Price. He’s so well regarded and so well loved – and has so many friends in high places (the police chief of his town has a picture on his office wall of the two of them shaking hands, and so naturally he doesn’t for a moment believe Our Heroine’s story about him having drugged and raped her!) – that he can pursue his brutal avocation with impunity and literally laugh at anyone who threatens to bring him to account.

Warren’s latest pigeon is Mara (Fayelen Bilodeau, a rather mousy-looking woman except for her spectacular long red hair), who like her predecessors has graduated at the top of her class in business school and comes to him looking for help getting started in the business world. He says he can’t hire her for his company but she can come to work for him and his wife as their nanny, and while she’s doing that she can sit in on his business meetings and conference calls and see what she can learn that will help her later on. He also makes a series of increasingly intense passes at her, and of course the more she tells him that he’s “crossing the line” the more ardent his attempts to seduce her become (after a while he starts to seem like Harvey Weinstein in a much hotter bod), until she finally turns in her notice and he responds by offering her a drink, then drugging her and raping her under the influence. She manages to get her energies together long enough to escape and flee to the home she shares with her roommate and best friend Claire (Kennedy Tucker), only when her boyfriend Zack (Robert Palmer Watkins) tries to find her another job he learns that Warren has sent out notices to every business in the area threatening to blackball them if they hire her. Warren also has a bodyguard and “fixer” named Buck (Max Decker) whose job includes eliminating anyone who gets too close to him and starts threatening to expose his secrets. One of his targets is Ryan (Matt Pratt), an attractive man with shoulder-length hair who shows up at Warren’s home demanding information about his sister, who was one of Warren’s previous victims. Buck strangles him and throws the body in the trunk of his vehicle, a black SUV that almost becomes a character itself since its appearance signals that Warren and Buck are in the vicinity watching the pathetic attempts of the other characters to expose Warren. Buck also beats Zack to within an inch of his life and puts him in the hospital, where he’s comatose for a couple of acts and ultimately pulls through.

The most impressive aspect of The Nanny Murders is its socially conscious portrayal of Warren’s incredible power either to intimidate or silence anyone who might expose him; the story takes on Kafka-esque properties as Mara runs smack into the sheer extent of Warren’s influence and popularity. It reminded me of the line in Orson Welles’ film Confidential Report (a.k.a. Mr. Arkadin), in which the young man Welles’ super-tycoon character hired to investigate his background (ostensibly to anticipate what an FBI background check might turn up on him, really to find anyone who could expose his criminal past so he could have those people killed) realizes that with the information he has on Arkadin, he’s become Arkadin’s mortal enemy. “Where in the world can I flee?” he complains. “He owns half of it!” That’s the pickle Mara and her friends find themselves in until (surprisingly easily – like a lot of previous Lifetime villains, Warren is extremely careful in some aspects of his operation and incredibly sloppy in others) Mara breaks into Warren’s home and steals his computer files as well as his written records detailing his payouts to previous women he silenced with non-disclosure agreements (sounds like Donald Trump! Indeed, though he’s considerably better looking, Coby Ryan McLaughlin wouldn’t be bad casting for Trump in a biopic). She’s able to do this because she’s seen a TV report that Warren and his wife are attending a charity banquet in honor of their philanthropies, which made me briefly wonder if writer Purdy was going to pull the old Lifetime trick of having Mara and her friend Claire crash the charity event and expose him publicly instead of pulling the old Lifetime trick of having the wife turn against him, report him to the police (she didn’t have much of a choice once she saw Mara’s footage from Warren’s computer showing him in the act of murdering one of his previous nannies), and the wife, Mara, Claire and Zack (ya remember Zack?) start their own business together, which seems to be doing well even though we never know quite what it does or how it makes money and the new partners seem to spend most of their time in the office drinking coffee and champagne. (I had briefly expected to see the wife drug Mara’s drink and start the whole cycle over again, but fortunately Purdy at least didn’t do that to us.)

I’m not sure I wouldn’t have liked The Nanny Murders better if Purdy and director Gaston had dared an unhappy ending, with Mara either destroyed or dead and Warren still riding high, but even as it stands The Nanny Murders has moments of real power as well as bits of rank stupidity; like Obsessed with the Babysitter, it’s a slightly better than average Lifetime movie that with more thoughtful and daring scripting could have been something really special.