1992’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is B-movie perfection, a secretly elegant story of women in competition that satirizes both maternity and sorority. And on top of that, the film gives viewers a diabolically great performance from Rebecca De Mornay as its villain, a woman out for revenge against the mother who exposed her sex-offender husband, leading to his suicide. As directed by Curtis Hanson (yeah, the L.A. Confidential guy), it’s a crowd-pleasing gem that prefigures thousands of Lifetime Network knockoffs.
So it’s fitting that Hulu (or 20th Century Studios, more precisely) saw fit to remake it as exactly one of those pieces of weightless junk food. 2025’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle recodes the original’s feminine ambivalence and unites its two battling forces — once again a mother and a hired nanny — as united in victimhood, with both women abused by the same man. Then it proceeds to do absolutely nothing with that idea, teasing it out as a meaningless mystery before returning to the perfunctory violence of a more routine thriller.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead is Caitlyn, mother of two, including a newborn. She’s also an obnoxious and wealthy helicopter mom, obsequiously micromanaging her kids’ diet and routines. The film paints her very bluntly as a rich bitch who can afford to blindly hire help, as opposed to said hired help, Polly (Maika Monroe). The latter talks openly with her new employer about struggling to make ends meet, which of course triggers Caitlyn’s well-intentioned but condescending attempts at connection and assistance. Polly moves into the guest room, and the antics begin.
At first, her pokes against the family unit are subtle; Polly pretends to forget Caitlyn’s rules about not feeding the baby formula. A bizarre perceived transgression is prompted by Caitlyn witnessing Polly having sex with a female friend — something the film presents as unsettling for no good reason. Eventually, it’s revealed that Caitlyn has a history of postpartum depression, and she fears that Polly is manipulating her and her family for some nefarious end. As she sinks further into paranoia, her dipshit husband (Raúl Castillo) utterly fails to make himself useful. Ask yourself, if your partner — whether you believed them or not— insisted that they didn’t feel safe having someone around your children, would you repeatedly find excuses to ignore them? It’s patently absurd plotting, never mind that it seemingly exists solely because any rational human behavior would shut down the film in a heartbeat.
Director Michelle Garza Cervera brings a distinctly televisual style to the whole thing, lots of soft/shallow focus, drab colors, crushed blacks in night scenes, and medium close-ups. In other words, it looks like every single other streaming film. Winstead and Monroe, meanwhile, aren’t asked to do enough to make their performances any more than adequate, let alone memorable or pleasingly unhinged. By the time the full scope of the situation has been revealed to the audience, we’re meant to read the two women as trapped in a mutual struggle against a history of suffering brought on by a cruel man. But instead of reckoning with that, we get a bitch fight following by a heavily foreshadowed shock death. It’s all anyone expects from something like this, which is clearly why nobody tried to do anything better.
DIRECTOR: Michelle Garza Cervera; CAST: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Maika Monroe, Raúl Castillo, Martin Starr; DISTRIBUTOR: Hulu; STREAMING: October 22; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 45 min.
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