A Film Canon

The Hand That Rocks The Cradle plays like a sublime Lifetime offering, which is to say that it's poised at the very nexus between suburban melodrama and suburban horror, and that it takes an oblique approach to moral panic, insisting that women have desires and fantasies that are sufficiently dark, complex and interesting to even panic about. Unlike most Lifetime films, though, it reserves its narrative convolutions for the first third, in which a gynecologist abuses a pregnant housewife, Claire (Annabella Sciorra), whose husband, Michael (Matt McCoy) urges her to press charges. Shortly after, the gynecologist commits suicide, causing his own wife (Rebecca de Mornay) to miscarry, after which, disguised as nanny 'Peyton', she seeks employment with Claire and Michael, whom she perceives as responsible, and attempts to wean their baby away from them. Despite a series of convulsive, visceral moments, most of which seem designed to affirm the possibility of female pedophilia, or at least of some transgressive female desire analogous to pedophilia, the second two-thirds of the film are relatively meditative, as Curtis Hanson draws on the Puget Sound backdrop to crystallize Lifetime suburbia into a concatenation of glass and foliage - the greenhouse that comes to stand for Claire's womb, or the womb she's violated. At the same time, a whole series of vocal impediments, from Claire's asthma to her baby's cough, turn this glassy sheen into a form of suffocation - a wind-chime without wind - that freezes all the characters, gives birth to them still-born. When combined with the hyperactive operetta that loops through the house, it's a powerful riposte to the supposed excesses of women's melodrama, telemovies, and 'weepies' - less about forcing an emotional reaction than exploring a physiological connection, the synaptic link between tear glands and glottal stops, between welling up and the word that catches in your throat.