by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Lifetime’s first prime-time effort last night was a film
called Nanny Nightmare, yet another
story about an ordinary suburban couple who find themselves terrorized by a
nanny (a male this time — a
“manny,” to use the horrible term that actually appears in Brian McAuley’s
script), though this time there are a few interesting wrinkles. The couple are
James (Brady Smith) and Lauren (Erin Cahill), though James’s job has consumed
so much of his time he’s hardly ever home and indeed the couple have formally separated,
though James is still living on their property in the guest house. Lauren
suspects that James isn’t just working those late nights, especially since his assistant is gorgeous young
red-headed woman Summer (Elyse Dufour), who when we see them together looks
upon him with such goop-eyed admiration it’s clear she wants considerably more
than just a working relationship
with him. James and Lauren have two children, teenage boy Carter (Tyler Huth)
and baby Riley (Oaklyn White), who was conceived in vitro. The “manny” — though it’s clear he’s a good deal
more than that — is Owen Leary (Jake Manley), a young man of almost unearthly
beauty (and director Brian Herzlinger exploited that by giving us quite a few
luscious shots of him topless, including one in which he clandestinely
photographs Summer in bed while himself wearing nothing but blue underpants —
yum!) who was formerly a neighbor of James and Lauren — indeed, Lauren
remembers baby-sitting him years before.
Owen shows up and in the manner of
Lifetime’s villains immediately makes himself useful, fixing the house’s front
door and dryer — things James had been promising to do but hadn’t got around to
— wiring a video “nanny cam” in baby Riley’s bedroom to go along with the audio
system Lauren already had in there (the assumption behind McAuley’s script
seems to be that any truly
responsible parents bug their kids and spy on them 24/7) and, unbeknownst to
our lead couple, planting video devices in the rest of the house and wiring
them so he can spy on them on a bank of three computer monitors in his own
home. Owen ostensibly lives alone with his mother Beth, but unsurprisingly it
turns out two-thirds of the way through the movie that he’s killed her and
stuffed her into an air duct in their home (where her corpse is attracting
flies). Owen is doing all this because he has a sexual obsession with Lauren
(one gets the impression it was a schoolboy crush he formed when Lauren was
baby-sitting him and he never outgrew it); he’s also an aspiring musician,
though the only evidence of that we actually hear is a few power chords he
plays while ostensibly giving Carter guitar lessons, though he tells James and
Lauren that it’s because he’s an aspiring musician that he’s had to have so
many different kinds of jobs he can do just about anything for them they need.
In any event, Owen’s obsession with Lauren leads him to do all manner of
things, including cruise Summer in a bar, get himself invited back to her
place, and when she’s asleep he shoots cell-phone photos of her in her
underwear and, with his skills as a computer hacker, plants the pics on James’
phone and leads Lauren to demand he leave the guest house and take his carcass
somewhere else. (Quite a few Lifetime movies feature actually or hypothetically
cuckolded-on wives peremptorily throwing out their straying husbands instead of
sticking it out and fighting for them.) Then he hangs her and stages the scene
to look like he committed suicide. The plan — assuming Owen has one, which
McAuley seems uncertain about (or at least he wants us to be uncertain about it) — is that if the cops
don’t buy the suicide story he’ll frame James for the murder, he’ll be rid of
Lauren’s inconvenient husband and he, Lauren and Riley will be a family. James
actually does find himself suspected
of Summer’s murder, and it’s only through information he got from Meghan
(Rebecca Lines), the woman at the fertility clinic who did their IVF, that he
realizes Owen is really an obsessed crazy who wants him dead or imprisoned so
he can have Lauren.
Owen actually got as far as an open-mouthed kiss with
Lauren, but later she had guilt feelings (like a Mike Nichols-Elaine May
character!) and pulled back from anything more physical with him — though James
happened to see this on the nanny cam and therefore both members of the couple are convinced the other was
cheating on them. It ends the way Lifetime movies in this genre usually do, with James returning to Lauren’s home
and saving her from Owen, eventually killing the young kid in self-defense with
an ax Owen had brought to terrorize Lauren by threatening to use it on Riley
(or was it James’ son Carter who killed Owen? This movie and the one Lifetime
showed right after it are blending together so well it’s hard for me to keep
the plot strands separate), though there’s an ominous tag scene in which Meghan
calls Lauren and tells her that Owen used to work at the clinic and
deliberately mixed up two of the sperm samples so … well, McAuley doesn’t come
right out and say it, but the implication is that Riley is Owen’s biological
child, not James’, which surprised me only to the extent that I thought McAuley
would have pulled that one earlier, having Owen tell Lauren that Riley is
really his child and using that
as an excuse for wanting James out of the family and himself in his place. Nanny
Nightmare is actually a pretty good
Lifetime movie, helped not only by Jake Manley’s gorgeousness but Herzlinger’s
skillfully Gothic direction — the last 20 minutes or so look almost like a
horror film — even though the script is the usual Lifetime silliness (I’ve seen
McAuley’s name on quite a few of these Lifetime entertainments before) and
aside from Manley’s relatively understated performance as the psycho, it isn’t
acted particularly well either, though I give Tyler Huth points as Carter for
making it believable that at times he’d welcome Owen as a sort of older
brother, and at other times he’d just be revolted by him and his smarmy act —
in essence he’s the equivalent of Thelma Ritter’s character in All
About Eve, on to the slimeball before
anyone else in the dramatis personae.
