Director: Seth Holt
Writers: Jimmy Sangster, Marryam Modell
Stars: Bette Davis, Wendy Craig, Jill Bennett
Run Time: 1 Hour, 33 Minutes
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/332iLZN
Synopsis
We start out with an opening shot of children playing on the most dangerous-looking playground equipment I’ve ever seen. Bette Davis walks through the park feeding the birds. Everything is wholesome and wonderful as the credits roll.
She eventually arrives back home, and we see that she’s the nanny in a home where the parents are fighting about something. Inside the box she was carrying is a cake with “Welcome Home Joey” written on it. The parents are going to pick up little Joey from the asylum, where he’s lived for two years. His mother doesn’t want him to come home.
We flashback to when everyone was happy, and there was a little girl living there, which sets the mother off crying again.
The psychiatrist in charge of the asylum explains that Joey is definitely not all right. Joey scares the nurse by making it look like he had hung himself. He’s mentally disturbed, but they won’t know how things will turn out until he’s been back at home for a while. The psychiatrist explains that “The boy has a destructive attitude toward middle-aged females.” As soon as he’s gone from the asylum, the staff there are really glad he’s gone.
Joey very quickly makes it clear that he doesn’t like Nanny. He explains that he knows how to make a hangman’s knot, and he even unpacks a working noose from his bag. Joey says he’s a big boy now and doesn’t really need a nanny any more. The father says she’s part of the family now, and she must stay to help with the housework.
Joey’s Aunt Pen comes to visit, and it comes up that she has a bad heart. Pen thinks they should get rid of the nanny as well. There’s a lot of drama as Joey fights with pretty much everybody, and his mother won’t stop crying. There’s a fight about Joey not wanting the nanny to come into the bathroom while he’s having a bath, which is far more dramatic than it needs to be, since it’s a simple request. All the while, the nanny makes one excuse after another for the child, all trying to reduce tension as a good nanny would.
Joey meets the girl upstairs, Bobbie, and they talk about kids stuff. Joey tells her that his sister died, and he got blamed for it. Joey accuses the nanny of trying to poison him, and her reaction is not what you’d expect.
For a long while, the nanny looks like the reasonable one and Joey looks like a little psychopath. Could it be that’s not the whole story? Maybe this nanny isn’t actually Mary Poppins.
One thing leads to another, and soon enough, the nanny and little Joey have their inevitable showdown…
Commentary
Little Joey knows how to push people’s buttons. He’s a master manipulator, that’s for sure. Just under an hour in, we start to get a pretty good idea of what’s going on, but it’s not really clear until then.
Eventually, the whole story comes out about what happened two years ago, and it’s not exactly what you’d predict. The nanny has her version of the story, and so does Joey. Unlike the villains in most horror films, everyone here has a story, and they are all more or less somewhat sympathetic.
That said, the ending is surprisingly weak. What actually happened to the nanny? We don’t know.