‘The Hand That Rocks the Cradle’ Review: Secrets Bloom in a Slow-Burn Suburban Thriller

Remakes of once-popular films usually take one of two escape routes to avoid direct comparison: they either change the plot just enough so that only fans of the original will notice, or they inflate everything—bigger twists, louder scares, faster pacing. The 2025 version of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Curtis Hanson’s 1992 hit thriller, follows the first tradition but pointedly rejects the second. While the screenplay shifts many narrative details without altering the core conflict, Mexican filmmaker Michelle Garza Cervera (Huesera) chooses a personal, distinctive approach in her staging: compared with the original, her film is quieter, moodier, and built on a sustained low-intensity unease.

The central premise is intact: the latent danger of leaving your children with someone you don’t fully know. Today it’s easy enough to check references, websites, and social media—though few characters here seem inclined to do so—but the anxiety never fully disappears. In this version, when we first meet Polly (current scream-queen Maika Monroe), we’re given no clear hint of her secret. What we do see—hardly subtle—is her chilly demeanor, her methodical habits, something a bit off in her stillness. Caitlin (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), however, doesn’t seem troubled. She meets Polly first through her pro bono work helping tenants, runs into her again on the street, asks for the requisite references, and still hires her as nanny to baby Josie and ten-year-old Emma (Mileiah Vega).

At first Polly is excellent at her job: the kids adore her, and Caitlin and her partner Miguel (Raúl Castillo) feel reassured. When Polly—whose precarious financial situation Caitlin already knows—admits that living in Los Angeles is becoming impossible, Caitlin offers her the guest house behind their very California, very comfortable home. It’s there, subtly at first, that the cracks appear. Polly flirts with Miguel, and with Caitlin too (who had relationships with women before marrying). Odd accidents occur. Caitlin suspects incompetence, then something more deliberate. Is her paranoia justified? What exactly is Polly’s motive, and where is all this heading?

The complication is that Caitlin has a history of psychiatric issues—she’s medicated—and her rising alarm begins to look, to her family, like a relapse rather than a genuine threat. Garza Cervera uses that tension—the obvious danger versus the collective refusal to see it—to build a slow, steady current of suspense, almost never raising her voice. Except for a few announced hazards (the uninstalled “Stop” sign in the street is the most literal), the film operates through suggestion rather than shock. And even when things turn violent, the remake opts—creatively, if not always cinematically convincingly—for attempts at dialogue and mutual understanding rather than a conventional genre blowout. But not even sisterhood can save the day; there’s only so much empathy a thriller can withstand before something inevitably breaks.

The script leans into contemporary themes that barely surfaced in the early ’90s. One is the attempt, almost to the point of denial, to find mutual understanding between two women locked in a psychological battle. Another is the more explicit critique of a liberal, performatively empathetic bourgeois family that practices solidarity mostly in theory. Other thematic updates, best left unspoiled, echo the original but arrive from different angles. Winstead guides her character from a fragile calm toward increasingly fractured territory, while Monroe plays Polly with an unnerving rigidity, almost like an AI-controlled cyborg. For a moment it seems the film might actually reveal something along those lines. It doesn’t—it’s simply the strategy Monroe (or the character) uses to mask intentions that aren’t all that well concealed.

For all its imperfections, what stands out most is the film’s narrative economy. Not low budget—one could make a much bloodier, more sensational movie with the same resources—but a commitment to small, accumulating details, to tension that creeps in rather than pounces. Garza Cervera comes from the school of hard-genre horror, but here she opts for something closer to a domestic suspense drama about women, families, motherhood, and the traumas that lodge in the body and quietly pass from one generation to the next.