Given this day and age where (mostly) everyone is traced to a social media presence and it’s not as easy to get away with saying who you aren’t, the premise of the original 1992 domestic thriller The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, where a sweet-natured mother essentially hires a stranger off the street to watch her children, wouldn’t exactly fly in 2025. Thankfully, director Michelle Garza Cervera reimagines Curtis Hanson’s original with a more modern lens, leaning into enough of the camp detachment the story calls for, whilst lacing it with a sense of emotional depth so that its thrills are earned.
The script – written by Micah Bloomberg (Sanctuary) and Amanda Silver (Avatar: The Way of Water) – doesn’t break any new ground within its genre subsect, or with its rinse-repeat cycle of narrative structure, but it at least doesn’t paint things as plainly black and white as its predecessor where Annabella Sciorra’s nice played opposite Rebecca De Mornay’s nasty. Here, Sciorra’s kindly mother is embodied through Mary Elizabeth Winstead‘s Caitlin Morales, a successful real estate attorney, who has that “you can have it all” temperament about her, what with her career, content marriage (Raúl Castillo as her husband, Miguel), and two young, darling children.
Through strategic placement, the professionally struggling Polly Murphy (Maika Monroe) puts herself in Caitlin’s path, charming her with her subdued nature and speaking to her motherly needs, offering up her nanny services to watch the Morales children, under the guise that this’ll give the overwhelmed Caitlin some more “her” time. Polly has references and seems to all too easily bond with Caitlin and Miguel’s family – it’s all too good to be true. And that’s because, it is.
Because of the set-up, we know Polly will gradually reveal herself to be a more villainous presence in the life of the Morales family, but because she’s just a little too good with her psychologically twisted tendencies, it’s only Caitlin that takes notice, which in turn only makes the mentally exhausted mother seem, for lack of a better word, crazy. Polly flaunts her bisexuality to deliberately discomfort both Caitlin and Miguel. She slowly turns both of Caitlin’s children against her. And when Caitlin’s suspicious bestie, Stewart (Martin Starr), does his own digging, it naturally leads to a confrontation that proves Polly is more than capable of inflicting physical pain as much as emotional; though her actions are a little more brutally straightforward compared to the elaborate sinisterness of De Mornay rigging up a killer greenhouse collapse to eliminate poor Julianne Moore in the original.
It all adds up to the fact that, wisely, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle ’25 is a different beast, and it’s why it should be viewed as its own entity. It’s a colder film than the original, detailing the lingering effects of trauma and how they can manifest in the individual. Whereas from the get-go of the 1992 edition we knew what triggered the nanny’s killer instinct, Polly’s motivations are less clear. There’s an opening image that alludes to a mindset of revenge, but Bloomberg and Silver’s script takes its time in revealing the who, why and how of it all, leading to a more grey shading when it comes to Caitlin, which, in turn, allows a deeper understanding around Polly’s actions.
A quiet, more patient thriller than some may expect – until it isn’t – The Hand That Rocks the Cradle takes pride in its restraint, letting both Winstead and Monroe unravel, before exploding with a violent mentality feels all the more surprising given the delicate terror that surrounds such.
THREE STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is available to stream on Hulu from October 22nd, 2025.
