I have to admit the thematic pairing was not a total coincidence. Once I'd already gone to the theater for a 4:30 showing of The Housemaid, free thanks to my critics card, it was easy to recall that the remake of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, a Hulu original, is available on Disney+ in Australia.
So it seemed like a good time to get in all my psychopathic maids, psychopathic nannies, psychopathic matriarchs and psychopathic patriarchs, whatever the case may be. (I won't spoil it and tell you which movies contain which, or if some are not in any, but this covers all the possibilities so as to keep things vague.)
I didn't realize how much beyond their superficial similarities these two movies would have in common. And to consider those similarities, I should probably issue a SPOILER ALERT, though the spoilers don't get into anything really juicy about the resolution of either of the plots.
And since the similarities all have to do with the pairs of women vying for power in the household, and that a housekeeper and a nanny are not exactly the same type of live-in help, I'll refer to them as "the matriarch" and "the outsider."
Consider:
1) In both movies, the matriarch is prone to tirades as a result of a history of mental instability.
2) In both movies, the oldest daughter also has some version of these emotional problems.
3) In both movies, the outsider is seen living or recently lived in her car.
4) In both movies, the outsider buys a six-pack of cupcakes with extra frosting as a way of ingratiating herself to the oldest daughter. (I thought this one seemed very specific.)
5) In both movies, the sexuality of the outsider is a threat to the matriarch, though potentially not always because of its impact on her husband.
6) In both movies, one of the two women lost her family in a fire when she was a young girl, though it's the matriarch in one and the outsider in the other. It's heavily implied that the person whose family was lost was actually responsible for the fire.
7) Again SPOILER ALERT, but in both movies it's ultimately revealed that the person whose family was lost was not responsible for the fire -- though that doesn't mean someone in the movie wasn't responsible for it.
There were others I thought of as I was watching Hand, but these were the ones I remembered when I started taking notes halfway through.
Unfortunately, both movies also get only 2.5 stars from me.
Without getting into further spoiler territory that's unnecessary to get into right now, The Housemaid takes a turn at some point that complicates the assumptions we've had all along. This turn dragged the movie up from being something I wasn't enjoying very much to something that felt like it had more promise, but then it came back down to earth as fairly conventional by the end.
As for The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, the thing I cherish about the Curtis Hanson original is how it showcases that director's excellence with tight genre films, the other example being The River Wild. While that movie gets great mileage from playing out in a straightforward manner, this one needed to do more than that to interest me in 2025. (Release year of the movie, not the year in which I saw it.) One thing I'll say, though, is that Ariel Marx's score is one of my favorites of the year, and the movie is almost worth seeing just for its music.
It strikes me that this is not the only pair of 2025 movies where one is sort of a remake of the earlier movie, and then one is an actual remake/sequel. The same can be said of The Monkey and Final Destination: Bloodlines. Both movies involve gruesome deaths that play out in a manner that seems preordained, though The Monkey is only a spiritual remake of Final Destination, while Bloodlines is obviously the latest in that series. However, in that case, both of those movies earned four stars from me and are currently both in my top 30 for the year.
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