American domestic life was fraught back in 1992, at least judging by the sheer number of stalker-thrillers hitting theaters. The year after Sleeping with the Enemy and Cape Fear had protagonists looking over their shoulders, audiences were told to watch out for new roommates via Single White Female, certain sexual partners via Basic Instinct, and supposedly friendly neighborhood cops via Unlawful Entry. The year’s tone-setter was one of the biggest hits of the ’90s stalker-thriller era: The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, which has now become the first of these movies to receive an official remake. It’s the perfect choice for a movie to update — so it’s disappointing to see the 2025 version bringing up a variety of provocative ideas before backing down.
In the original film, nanny Peyton Flanders (Rebecca De Mornay) sets her sights on Claire (Annabella Sciorra), her husband Michael (Matt Bartel), and their two children. She wants to use her access to the family to usurp Claire, and claim Michael, the kids, and their picture-perfect life for herself, as restitution for her losses.
Peyton had her own seemingly idyllic life, until Claire filed sexual-abuse charges against Peyton’s husband Victor Mott, ending his career, which led him to take his own life. The stress of his suicide sent Peyton into early labor, and she lost her baby. Afterward, she redirected her rage and grief toward Claire. (This is not a spoiler of a third-act reveal; the movie begins with a full explanation of Peyton’s grudge.)
Though the movie was a big hit in 1992, it’s also weirdly low on tension. The viewers know Peyton’s motives, and aren’t particularly invited to identify with her and fret about whether she’ll get caught. It’s certainly creepy when she secretly takes over breastfeeding Claire’s baby, but much of the movie lacks a sense of perversity or danger. In pure plot terms, Peyton is explicitly focused on stealing Claire’s family, rather than harming them, and even the threat to Claire never seems particularly potent. And there isn’t much threat in waiting to see whether the family catches on before Peyton hurts someone peripheral to the family.
There’s plenty of room, then, for a version of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle that attends more closely to the psychology of domestic anxieties. The original film deals broadly with the fear of home invasion: someone trespassing in your life and forcefully taking parts of it away. In this case, it’s a hot, young-ish woman invading a housewife’s domestic space, with an eye on seducing her husband and currying favor with her children. There’s also an unspoken fear that in doing so, she’ll turn Claire’s substantial emotional labor invisible by making it look easy.
But the movie de-emphasizes that potential emotional turmoil by externalizing its threats as quickly as possible. So Claire is left out of breath because Peyton tampered with her asthma inhalers, rather than being disoriented by the presence of someone stealing her previous role in the home. Her marriage shows no signs of internal strife, just the machinations of the evil blonde. (Everyone agrees Peyton is hot as hell, but she ultimately presents no serious competition: Michael is uninterested.) Though Peyton has suffered a terrible series of losses, she is an unambiguous lunatic, without ever going as unhinged as a truly great movie villain. She falls into a dull middle ground, neither especially sympathetic nor deliciously evil.
The new film moves in the opposite direction. Caitlyn (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), Claire’s equivalent, is a lawyer rather than a housewife, seemingly on leave from her job and overwhelmed by her responsibilities toward her 10-year-old daughter Emma (Mileiah Vega) and her infant Josie — and her control-freak way of handling them. She demonstrates the latter particularly acutely with Josie, insisting on glass feeding bottles only, no plastic, delivering exclusively breast milk, while also wanting Josie to acclimate to solid food early on, without any added sugars. It’s enough to make a quick trip to the farmers’ market exhausting.
Caitlyn meets Polly (Maika Monroe) through her law firm’s tenants’-rights outreach, and the younger woman appeals to Caitlyn’s sense of charity as well as her high standards. (A reference testifies to Polly’s years of child-care experience). Perhaps most enticing, though, is how Polly gives the sense that she has listened to and immediately understands Caitlyn’s specific moral objections to sugar, microplastics, and so on. Soon, Polly has become a full-time, live-in nanny for Caitlyn’s family.
Even those who haven’t seen the original film will suspect that something is amiss with Polly, though versatile scream queen Monroe (from It Follows and Longlegs, among others) plays her as more grounded and less explicitly villainous than De Mornay’s character. Her performance is complemented by similarly nuanced (and often bravely unlikable!) work from Winstead. Director Michelle Garza Cervera (who made the 2022 pregnancy-themed horror film Huesera: The Bone Woman) and screenwriter Michael Bloomberg portray Caitlyn as less of an innocent victim than her 1992 equivalent, tapping into the anxieties many mothers feel as they attempt to balance careers, home life, and their personal decisions about how they’ll be parenting their children.
In this way, the new Hand That Rocks the Cradle is more akin to Martin Scorsese’s version of Cape Fear, and not just because there are multiple scenes of finger-sucking. In the Scorsese film, crazed stalker Max Cady (Robert De Niro) represents an ethical lapse by family man Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte); as Cady’s lawyer, Sam suppressed evidence that might have helped his case, because he was convinced of the man’s guilt. Caitlyn also has a skeleton in her closet, revealed much later than in the original film, and vaguely in the spirit of the #MeToo nature of Claire’s charges against Mr. Mott in the 1992 movie. But beyond that, Polly’s presence — specifically, the way she agrees to Caitlyn’s rules only to privately (and later, not-so-privately) undermine them — nags at Caitlyn’s anxiety that she’s doing motherhood incorrectly, challenging her identity. She’s a series of familiar, common insecurities come to life.
To that end, Caitlyn also starts to feel that she’s performing incorrectly as a wife. Upon learning that Polly is dating a woman, Caitlyn mentions that she was in a relationship with another woman before she married her husband Miguel (Raúl Castillo). That detail, as well as Polly’s pointedly unsurprised reaction, hangs over some of their subsequent interactions: At times, Caitlyn seems slightly overfamiliar, and Polly blanches; later, when Emma questions her own sexuality, with Polly’s encouragement, Caitlyn manages to bristle at everyone in the room, including Emma, over their handling of the situation.
In these scenes, the 2025 Hand That Rocks the Cradle goes much further than the 1992 version, which is one of the most straightforward and least fraught entries in its era’s domestic-stalker boom. Single White Female and Basic Instinct are more sexually explicit, and sometimes slasher-movie violent. Unlawful Entry is more purely suspenseful. Yet the new film doesn’t quite match those movies, either, even though the story and characterization are a hell of a lot smarter.
The original Hand That Rocks the Cradle has almost nothing of substance to say about its subject, beyond suggesting that someone in Claire’s position (affluent, largely serene) might eventually become afraid of someone in Peyton’s situation (less advantaged, but seemingly better at domestic tasks). Cervera’s 2025 remake offers plenty of thoughts about motherhood, guilt, uneasy sexuality, and performance of gender roles, enough to make it a more rewarding experience than its source material. But little of this turns into a proper throughline that could help the movie resonate more deeply than momentary recognition of those issues.
In several sequences, Cervera seems poised to drive the story to a more emotionally charged peak, or go for a more unhinged exploitation-movie tone. Monroe and Winstead certainly seem up for it. Yet in these moments, Cervera pulls back, trying for something more tastefully empathetic while still heading toward a predictably violent finale. And for all her restraint, she doesn’t come up with an image as evocative as the original movie impaling its stalker on a white picket fence. The new version ends on with enough ambiguity that it almost becomes an obtuse dodge, with Cervera refusing to show whether these characters have sustained real damage from their experiences.
The focus on Caitlyn’s attempts to micromanage her domestic sphere, keeping her baby free of sugar or microplastics before inevitably sending her out into a more chaotic and dangerous world, roots the movie firmly in contemporary unease about a different form of home invasion. Caitlyn is worried about someone else’s child-rearing decisions threatening to supplant hers; Polly is arguably just giving Caitlyn little nudges in directions of stress she might have experienced anyway. It’s a shame that the filmmakers pull away from provocation so cleanly and easily. They have their sights set on domestic messiness, and wind up with neatly folded laundry.
