Back in the ’90s, I was just a little baby boy. I’d watch a lot of Seinfeld and a lot of The Simpsons, which were often my touchstones for other things in pop culture. This means that I knew about movies like Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, and Sleeping with the Enemy as things that existed, based on jokes and commercials, yet were movies I was entirely oblivious to. In fact, one of my major points of reference for The Hand that Rocks the Cradle was that there was a joke in a Seinfeld episode about how a character was named Rebecca De Mornay, though the extent of the joke was…a character was named Rebecca De Mornay. And now, having burned through countless ’90s slashers getting the remake treatment, we’ve reached the point of psychological thrillers from that era getting revivals. And, like many of those slasher revivals, this new take on The Hand That Rocks the Cradle feels like a reboot in name only that doesn’t offer anything particularly insightful or interesting.

As she tries to maintain a work-life balance with a newborn, Caitlin (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) hires nanny Polly (Maika Monroe) to help around the house. Things start off great, with Polly striking up a connection with Caitlin’s daughter, and Polly seemingly reminding Caitlin of some of her own experiences when she was younger. Despite getting off to a good start, Caitlin starts to notice a few ways in which Polly is making slip-ups that contradict instructions, which is just the tip of the iceberg of what Polly’s true motivations are.

All those movie titles I mentioned earlier that were interchangeable to me in my younger years could be classified as “thrillers,” with the ’90s seeing a surge in such stories as a bit of a reaction to the more straightforward slashers that dominated the ’80s. Many of these movies weren’t just “thrillers,” though, as many of them would also have the qualifier of being psychological, erotic, or domestic thrillers. Part of the reason so many of these movies were interchangeable with one another is due to how formulaic or generic many of them feel in retrospect, with this new The Hand That Rocks the Cradle fully fitting in with those ’90s thrillers for how forgettable it is.

I think Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Maika Monroe both rock, so knowing they’d be going up against each other initially had me excited. That first 30-45 minutes did work for me, where they have chemistry together and even an unspoken physical attraction. Where things start to fall apart is when Polly starts crossing boundaries, with things immediately feeling off and escalating too quickly to buy that Polly could be a normal person. As opposed to giving any glimpses of maternal instinct, Polly is a bit off-putting and cold, making it hard to believe Caitlin would ever accept her into the family at all. This ultimately feels like a scripting issue, as neither the audience nor the other characters get to see how well Polly handles children in a way that Caitlin might be able to overlook small setbacks.

While “gaslighting” has become a bit of a buzzword over the past decade, this specific phrase was coined in regard to the 1938 play Gas Light, which became the 1940 UK movie Gaslight, leading to the American version of Gaslight in 1944. This new Hand That Rocks the Cradle is essentially about how Polly is gaslighting Caitlin, or, if you’re not that familiar with the term, Polly is mentally manipulating Caitlin in a way that gets her to deny her own reality. There was a lot of potential to explore the difference in gaslighting in 2025 vs. the original 1992 movie, but we just get the surface-level exploration of this idea. Additionally, with Polly’s background being called into question by Caitlin as things take a darker turn, modern-day technology would make it seem pretty simple to fact-check Polly’s story, only for the film to resort to trying to surreptitiously check her DNA to find out who the hell she is. A 2025 version of the story could have also explored power dynamics in family settings and the differences between genders to make the movie feel fresh, yet we didn’t really get any of that.

This new The Hand That Rocks the Cradle isn’t at all a horrid experience by any stretch of the imagination, it just makes you wonder why it got made in the first place when it wasn’t going to do all that much to deviate from the source material. The ultimate reveal of what Polly is doing and why she’s doing it is different from the 1992 movie, and there’s nothing about the movie that’s necessarily poorly made, it’s more a question of who this movie is designed for. I guess since it’s debuting on Hulu, it’s designed for people who recognize the title or maybe one of the actresses and doesn’t really expect more than to watch people talk to each other and say things for an hour and 45 minutes? In that case, this movie absolutely delivers!

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