"I think they're gonna kill me". Oh yeah, that's reassuring. I guess I'll check au pair off my career list.
Anyway, 2020's The Captive Nanny is my latest review. And in the tradition of the entity in The Amityville Horror yelling "get out!", I felt compelled to say the same thing to the pushover childminder in "Captive". Heck, she needn't be in that reconnaissance house for more than a half hour (hint, hint).
Clocking in at a running time of 100 minutes (with brief commercials) and billed as a thriller with a touch of the "violence of the mind", The Captive Nanny's layered plot goes like this: A young woman who can't adopt and ends up splitting from her boyfriend, decides to take a job as a live-in nanny with a creepy family bent on watching her every move. When said family loses said woman's trust, they confine her to her room and hold her against her will.
The performances in "Captive" are solid with Karynn Moore playing nanny Chloe and Austin Highsmith and Michael Aaron Milligan playing psychotic parents Emily and Michael. Highsmith is the standout and she slowly slides off rails channeling snide villainy, mild rage, and tortured manipulation.
Watching The Captive Nanny, you eventually want her to suffer because she's also a cuckoo stalker. You want Highsmith's Emily to get what's coming to her and its defeating that Moore's Chloe doesn't have the gumption to at least fight back or break a darn window.
"Captive", with all its Flowers in the Attic leavings and its ode to all things invasion of privacy, is one of your more effective Lifetime movie endeavors. It's frustrating, upsetting, gnawing, and bends the spectrum of TV-made, psychological terror. Observing The Captive Nanny in all its crippled sterility, you feel as if you are also "under lock and key". Rating: 3 stars.
The Captive Nanny
2020
Action / Thriller
The Captive Nanny
2020
Action / Thriller
96% - Critics
4.9Plot summary
Chloe (Karynn Moore) is a nanny who desperately wants to adopt but needs to get her life together first. She finds the perfect live-in nanny position with the Brown family - Emily (Austin Highsmith),Michael (Michael Aaron Milligan) and their son - that will help get her life back on track. She quickly learns they're oddly strict about security, with coded locks on all doors. Emily explains it's due to her famous musician ex named Baz (Jason Skeen),who stalks her. Horrified, Chloe agrees to help Emily and Michael keep their son safe. But when Chloe notices things seem a bit off with the Browns, Emily and Michael turn on Chloe and accuse her of being a spy for Baz. They lock her up to force a false confession out of her, but Chloe soon learns that it's not Baz that's making bad things happen - it's Emily, who is determined to win back Baz by any means necessary.
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VIEWS ON FILM review of The Captive Nanny
Too absurd
There have been a few of these absurd crazy employer trapping a nanny shows. Also involving a crazy fan of a star. Don't get the motivation for the wacko.
It is not interesting. Don't bother.
Lifetime goes horror
"The Captive Nanny" plays like a horror movie. It's weird and creepy. There was a lot of "get out of the house" going on watching this movie. The cast all does a very nice job, especially Karynn Moore. Moore gives a very good performance. "The Captive Nanny" is a different kind of Lifetime movie and I liked it.