Domestic discord with the live-in help double feature

I said yesterday that I wanted to watch some 2025 movies that didn't cost me anything, so then later yesterday I saw two of them -- and they were both on the same theme.

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. 

It sets everything up, it pays everything off

Have you ever seen a movie that doesn't have a single wasted scene -- a single wasted moment?

I have. I saw it for the third time on Sunday night, but the first in about 20 years.

I don't think I thought all that much of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle when I first saw it sometime in the early 1990s, within a year or two of its 1992 release. I didn't dislike it, but it went in one ear and out the other. These sorts of thrillers were pretty commonplace during that period, and this one did nothing to distinguish itself.

Or so I thought.

The occasion to rewatch Curtis Hanson's film came when I was reviewing for AllMovie, and working from a giant list of movies to review in order to initially build up their review database. If I'm being honest, I'll tell you that I wrote many of these 300-word reviews from my memory of the films. It was the only way to review them quickly, something I needed to do because they paid only $20 a pop, and for a short time around 2001 that was my only source of income. My contacts there surely knew I wasn't rewatching all these films, since I would frequently submit 20 reviews a week or thereabouts, but they didn't bat an eyelash.

But some I did rewatch. Not a lot, but The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was one of them. I'm not sure why in this case I felt it would benefit me to watch it again, but boy am I glad I did.

I emerged from that second viewing with a sense that not only was this not a forgettable, interchangeable domestic invasion thriller, but it was almost a perfect example of the craft of screenwriting.

I know over the years I've tended to credit Hanson with what makes the movie so good -- on its own terms (I'm not comparing it to Citizen Kane) -- but on Sunday night I finally learned the name of the person I should be crediting: Amanda Silver.

The lone credited screenwriter of Cradle worked busily, if someone anonymously, in the 1990s, then disappeared until 2010. Without looking it up, I'm suspecting she stopped to have a family. It was what women still did at that time, even in Hollywood.

She's actually had quite the career the past ten years, now (still) working with her husband, Rick Jaffa. They wrote and produced the new Planet of the Apes series, not to mention writing Jurassic World, In the Heart of the Sea and Mulan. I assume they've already submitted their script for Avatar 3 because I think that movie is mostly in the can. Interestingly, I don't find any of those films a superior example of screenwriting. Amanda Silver could have quit when she was ahead in the 1990s, though I imagine she's a lot richer now.

So just why is The Hand That Rocks the Cradle such a good script?

We all know that everything in a script is supposed to matter, is supposed to contribute to advancing the plot or fleshing out a character. But I'm not sure I've ever seen it done in such a streamlined fashion as in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.

There's simply no waste here. None. Every single story fragment that gets even a whiff of a mention has a bearing on the later plot. Interestingly, though, that doesn't mean the movie has no room to feel natural or to breathe -- an interesting choice of words when the film's protagonist, Claire (Annabella Sciorra), is an asthma sufferer.

No this is just a well-oiled machine, proceeding from point to point to point to create a relentless momentum of savvy exposition and rich character development. You might think that "developing" a character means giving him or her a chance to riff, like a Tarantino character would, but you'd be wrong. You can do this while seamlessly interweaving plot material such that not a single word of dialogue could be sacrificed. 

But just because everything matters doesn't mean that this is a tight 90 minutes, or that we're feeling rushed toward the conclusion. Cradle runs a full 110 minutes, but it doesn't feel like it, because that momentum is strong. The elements introduced are paid off within moments or at worst minutes, or if they take longer to pay off, you realize just how essential those little droplets of information were for believing the moment when they're finally cashed in. The deus ex machina is the enemy of good screenwriting, and a good screenwriter -- like Silver -- does all the work to prevent that crutch from ever being necessary.

I could cite examples, but I'd be here all day. You can't actually cite examples in a script like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, because you'd literally be citing everything. Each turn of phrase or inserted shot of a seemingly insignificant detail is doing the work of delivering the movie. Any Chekhov's guns here? You better bet they're going to go off by the ending.

I do think, however, that a good exercise in a screenwriting class would be to watch this movie once through, then start it again and pause it frequently to admire Silver's handiwork. If screenwriting classes involve a recitation of do's and don't's, then Cradle is all "do." 

And then, 110 minutes later, when the last little bit of story material has been paid off, you know what happens next?

The credits roll. 

No checking in on the family six months later. No epilogue of any kind. If you've been paying attention, you know that everything is going to be alright from here on out for this family. (Spoiler alert.) You don't need someone's misguided attempt to tie it all up with a bow.

The movie has been tying itself up with a bow for 110 minutes now, so when it gets to the end, it doesn't have to do anything else.

I call that a great script. 

I'll remember the name Amanda Silver now. Heck, maybe she'll even manage to make all 238 minutes of Avatar 3 seem essential.

Probably not, especially given the bloat involved in some of her more recent titles. But I am curious to go back to when she was her peak, if The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is any indication, and watch the two Silver-written films from the 1990s that I haven't seen -- The Relic and Eye for an Eye. I dismissed them at the time because they seemed like generic thrillers.

Be careful what, or who, you dismiss. 

Remembering a skilled tradesman

Curtis Hanson made two films that I cherish in 1997's L.A. Confidential and 2000's Wonder Boys. But those aren't really the films I think of when I think of Hanson, and they aren't what I'm remembering today, the day after he died at 71 of what was believed to be a heart attack.

L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys are auteur type projects, projects suggesting a particular vision on the part of their directors. The more interesting proof of his abilities -- to me, anyway -- was his two very above average director-for-hire projects, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and The River Wild.

Conveniently, we adopt and abandon the auteur theory as we see fit, calling certain directors intrinsic parts of certain films while saying they had little to do with the creative spark behind others. In truth, Hanson was credited as at least co-writer on both good movies (L.A. Confidential) and bad ones (Lucky You). But when it comes to Cradle and River, neither of which featured his input on the screenplay, they seem like for-hire projects because they were, very clearly, genre pictures. They were made for comparatively little money to make a tidy profit, and they basically just needed someone to yell "Cut!"

Hanson did a lot more than that. It's been at least 15 years since I've seen either of these movies, and probably closer to 20, but on my last viewing of Cradle in particular, I remembered what a tight little package it was, how it moved smoothly from to scene to scene in producing an intensely satisfying story about a psychotic nanny. Some of that credit likely goes to the lean script by Amanda Silver, but it takes a director with a particular understanding of the fundamentals of filmmaking to deliver a lean script into a lean film. In fact, I use Cradle as an unlikely go-to example of a movie where nary a scene is wasted.

But Cradle alone probably wouldn't have caused me to excessively ponder Hanson's merits as a genre filmmaker without being paired with The River Wild, a truly tense and harrowing spiritual successor to Deliverance in which Meryl Streep and David Straitharn play the parents in a family that gets kidnapped by Kevin Bacon and some of his redneck buddies on a rafting trip. I remember feeling a similar sense of the tightness of this film, the lack of fat, that kept things rolling along toward a satisfying conclusion. Again you might credit the screenwriter (this time Denis O'Neill), but taken in combination with Cradle, it really shows us what Hanson brought to that director's chair.

His very next film was Confidential, probably an unlikely successor, but the reward someone gets for doing a good job as a hired employee. He knocked it out of the park, and many think he should have won the best director Oscar in the year Titanic swept the Oscars. Instead he made another great film in 2000, Wonder Boys, which strayed further from his genre roots. 8 Mile was next, the returns diminishing only slightly.

Unfortunately, that was pretty much it for Hanson's time atop Hollywood. The returns started to noticeably diminish with In Her Shoes and especially Lucky You. It got so I didn't even see his final theatrical release, Chasing Mavericks, a project he had to leave halfway through for health reasons (ultimately being credited as a co-director with Michael Apted). It turns out Hanson also had Alzheimer's, a fact I did not know, and a possible/probable contributor to his death.

It's certainly the case that all directors have only a finite period at the top of their game, and almost anybody who makes five consecutive hits would have to be happy with that (if we are calling the two thrillers from the 1990s "hits"). And in truth, Hanson made some really good films before that, most notably the 1990 film Bad Influence, which I once loved but appreciated a lot less on my last viewing a couple years ago, else I might have featured it more prominently in this remembrance. Even the 1987 Steve Guttenberg film The Bedroom Window is a pretty solid technical achievement, if forgettable. (But let's not talk about the comedy he directed, the Tom Cruise vehicle Losin' It.)

But part of me thinks it's a shame that Hanson stopped making genre pictures. When people are really good at something that is considered less prestigious, they can get graduated out of it at their peril -- at our collective peril. Of course, never would I trade L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys for more River Wilds. But Hanson may have been a victim of his own success, as those movies basically disqualified him from making another River Wild. The result was some really limp, uninspired "auteur movies" (In Her Shoes and Lucky You).

The loss of Hanson is meaningful enough to me that I may indeed watch something to remember him. But it won't be Wonder Boys (which I watched again only a couple months ago) and it won't be L.A. Confidential (which I do want to see again soon, having most recently caught it in 2012). No, I want to see one of those two for-hire thrillers, to remind myself what a skilled tradesman can do if just given the basic tools of the trade he loves.