When her doctor husband commits suicide after sexual assault charges are filed against him by one of his patients, Peyton Flanders suffers a breakdown and a miscarriage. Upon her release from hospital, she immediately turns her vengeful attention to her late husband's accuser, a young woman celebrating the recent birth of her second child. Wrangling access to the couple's home in the guise of a nanny, the gradually complex web of lies, innuendo and menace that Flanders weaves soon begin to take their toll on her unsuspecting quarry. It's only after she has engineered the gruesome death of a family member who has cottoned on to her real identity that her mendacious plan starts to go awry. As evidenced by his previous film, Bad Influence, director Curtis Hansen - here working from a screenplay by Amanda Silver - knows the Hitchcockian contours of the low budget urban thriller well. And while the film's go-for-broke hysterical climax inevitably panders to an audience's worst primal instincts, it is staged, shot and cut with the kind of visual flair that is missing in many bigger budgeted titles of a similar bent. As the vindictive nanny from hell, Rebecca De Mornay carries the film with an unnerving, chilling performance. Annabella Sciorra (Jungle Fver) and Matt McCoy look suitably spooked as the yuppie couple, while poor Ernie Hudson earns sympathy votes as the mentally handicapped handyman who incurs the nanny's wrath.
