Last night (March 17) at 10 p.m. I watched a 2022 Lifetime movie called Bad Nanny, third in an unofficial trilogy of films they showed about evil nannies, including Nanny Killer (when this one first aired I joked that it wasn’t clear from the title whether it was going to be about a person who killed nannies or a nanny who killed people; it was in fact the former, a story about the spoiled-brat psychopathic son of a rich man who knocks off the nannies dad hires to take care of him) and Nanny Dearest, a film so new it wasn’t listed ion imdb.com, Bad Nanny was about a mixed-race couple, Black woman Remy Bell-Winter (April Hale) and her husband Jack Winter (Brian Ramian, whose hot pecs were a joy to look at in the one scene in which we got to see him shirtless). Their previous nanny, a middle-aged white woman named Mathilda (Karen Ragan-George), is overpowered by the usual mysterious figure n a black hoodie just after she says goodbye to the Bell-Winters’ kid, Ella (Aria Jenna Pulliam). We’re not told until the very end what happened to her or who was responsible, but we get the idea when Kendra Patterson (Chelsea Rose Cook) – imdb.com lists the last name as “Peterson” but ut certainly sounded like “Patterson” to me on the soundtrack – shows up and gets the gig as Ella’s new nanny. The film was directed by Colleen Davie Janes and written by Jason Byers – it always strikes me as odd to see a Lifetime movie directed by a woman but written by a man – and Byers carefully keeps usz in suspense as to just what Kendra’s motive is for wanting the job and going after Remy int he way she does. Among her schemes are having Ella pick wildflowers in a patch of land that has a warning sign for poison ivy, then putting on gloves so she can handle the poison-ivy contaminated plants and rub them on the inside of Remy’s fancy ball gown on the eve of an important fundraiser for Remy’s charity.
Remy is the daughter of a member of Atlanta’s Black 1-percent, a class we’ve already seen in several previously Lifetime movies (including Pride and Prejudice: Atlanta, their very interesting reworking of Jane Austen’s classic in modern-day African-American terms), and she grew up in a world of power and privilege while Kendra was raised by a single mom until mom died (though we’re not sure how od Kendra wsas when she lost her mom).. Jack grew up poor and is all too aware that he’s economically totally dependent on his rich wife; he works in her and her dad’s business her dad is Marcus Bell (Gregory M. Mitchell), who for t most of the story is away opening a new branch of his land development firm in Canada but who returns to Atlanta to see his daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter in the lavish house his money has been able to supply them. The night of the big fundraiser that’s ruined by Remy catching poison ivy from her sabotaged dress (though for some reason daughter Ella, who picked the plants in the first place, doesn’t get it, and Remy gets it immediately so hshe can’t continue to host the fundraiser),Remy decides to host a replacement fundraiser as a barbecue in her backyard, which looks big enough you could probably host a World Cup soccer game in it. Jack is put out terribly that Remy offered to host the event at their home without bothering to ask him first, and Kendra takes advantage of the situation and the drunken binge Jack goes off when Remy flies out of town on a business trip to Charlotte to seduce Jack.
Eventually we learn that [spoiler alert!] Kendra is really Haley Patterson, illegitimate daughter of Marcus Bell and therefore Remy’s half-sister. Haley overheard Marcus tell her mom, in the one time she ever actually met her dad (until he turns up at Remy’s and Jack’s home during the main part of the film), that the reason he couldn’t leave his wife and marry Haley’s mother was of his responsibilities to Remy. Haley spent her whole life reading about Remy and her social doings in local newspapers while Haley herself was in a succession of orphanages, never adopted because she was considered too old and regularly sexually abused by the older boys in the institutions. As Kendra, she hatched a plot to destroy Remy’s life and take it over, assuming the role of Jack’s wife and Ella’s mom, which involved building up a record of two years’ work as a nanny for others in which, as the cops explain at the end, she “played the long game” and earned a series of glowing references from previous employers which would persuade Remy to hire her. Among her schemes was to send out a lubricious text message on Remy’s phone expressing her allegedly lustful feelings towards her assistant David (Trevor Lyons), a sort of “office husband” in the sense that 1930’s movies referred to a male executive’s female assistant as his “office wife.” This leads the board of directors of Remy’s foundation to fire her as CEO even though she started it, and it also leads her book editor, Tony (Paul C. Kelly) – did I tell you Remy had written a book and she intended to publish it and give the money to her charity? – to cancel its publication because it wouldn't do for a childrens’ book author to be embroiled in a sexual scandal.
In the end, Kendra kidnaps Ella and tells her that she’s her mommy now, while Ella is restive and tries to get away. Remy uses the GPS in the SUV Kendra stole and tracks her down in her family’s other car (one of them, anyway). Midway through the trip Kendra pulls into a diner and “accidentally” bumps into an older woman with long grey hair, She grabs the woman’s keys and steals her car, but fortunately Remy arrives just in time to see Kendra driving off ni the stolen car and continue the chase. Eventually they confront each other in a wood and Kendrra tells the whole story. Then she tries to kill Remy but Remy is able to grab a nearby rock and bash her head in. Kendra had already stabbed Marcus, her and Remy’s father, and it’s unclear whether either Marcus or Kendra actually die or recover from their wounds at the local hospital, which already has had no more than its fair share of patients from this family because in an earlier scene Kendra pusked Jack down a flight of stairs,then banged her own head against the bannister rail to make it look like Jack tried to rape her and she killed him, or tried to, in self-defense.
For me the most interesting part of Bad Nanny is the whole relationship of Jack and Remy, and particularly the way Jack feels “unmanned” by his wife having all the money and being the family’s breadwinner; he has a job, but it’s working for her. It might have been a more interesting story if the “bad nanny” had been motivated by a twisted sort of compassion for Jack’s situation that drew her to him and led to their affair, instead of him being just another pawn in her revenge scheme. It was also annoying how often Kendra changed hairstyles and clothes, sometimes in the middle of scenes (quite faster than any real woman could do it), though at least the casting director (uncredited on imdb.com) deserves credit for casting April Hale and Chelsea Rose Cook as the two female leads, since they look enough alike they’re believable as half-sisters. It was also nice to see them find a properly light-skinned girl like Aria Jenna Pullilam as Ella, since she’s light enough one can believe she’s the product of a mixed-race couple. Otherwise, Bad Nanny is an example of a well-done but overly formulaic Lifetime movie, as if Colleen David Janes and Jason Byers were all too well aware of what a Lifetime movie with the title Bad Nanny would be expected to be and were too afraid to toy with the formula even though some judicious variations on it could have made this a much better film.
