Rebecca de Mornay

  • Mother’s Day (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2022) There are good reasons why many people don’t like horror, and Mother’s Day feels like a distillation of those reasons in one handy package. It’s bleak in cinematography and dark in outlook. That, in itself, isn’t that unusual, but where this film takes it one step further in some exceptionally mean-spirited structure that, in the end, doesn’t lead to anywhere but a bleak ending. Building from a home invasion story (itself a rather tired cliché for needlessly dark horror), Mother’s Day occasionally shows glimpses of interest in the way it justifies its conceit. But that’s a very brief moment in a much longer-feeling package that delights in being pointlessly cruel. Our home invaders seem to style themselves after wannabee-jokers of sadistic choices. A repetitive tic of the film is for armed people asking unarmed people to do bad things to each other. It wouldn’t be as bad if it actually gave the impression of leading somewhere, or having some thematic depth to justify it. But there doesn’t seem to be—the best thing one can say about the film is that Rebecca de Mornay is thoroughly detestable as a domineering psychotic mother—but again, the character is so mean-spirited that her transgressions feel like a cheap trick with no point. Director Darren Lynn Bousman has a hit-and-miss filmography, but Mother’s Day doesn’t impress much. It’s basement-level horror without anything that makes the genre interesting.

  • The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992)

    The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, June 2019) I’m old enough to remember the chatter around The Hand that Rocks the Cradle back in 1992, combined with a mini-spate in home-infiltration thrillers along with Single White Female, and Sliver the following year. Decades later, the effectiveness of the film remains even as it’s easier to see how it blatantly manipulates audiences. The first few minutes of the film, for instance, have everything accompanied by ominous music to underscore that we’re watching a thriller and things are about to get really, really bad. Then the coincidences and vengeful plans and underhanded tactics multiply as our lead couple welcomes into their homes a young woman with very personal reasons to do them harm. Everyone’s upper-middle-class nightmares come true as she worms her way into the family, pits everyone against each other, isolates them from their friends and, in the final act, goes after them with a shovel and murderous intentions. It’s schematic, predictable, blunt and over-the-top and yet, even now, it’s still unnerving and infuriating at once. Rebecca de Mornay is terrifying as the psychopathic antagonist, easily outshining Anabella Sciora for the entire film. Julianne Moore pops up briefly, as does John de Lancie. Director Curtis Hanson doesn’t miss a trick from the thriller genre, which does get slightly annoying in the ending stretch of the film as it becomes a more standard psycho-inside-the-house sequence. The female empowerment message in The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (because, of course, it’s got to end with the young wife protagonist taking on the psycho killer—largely useless husband need not apply) is somewhat similar to the spate of home corruption thrillers of the early 1940s (Gaslight, Suspicion, etc.)—the woman is the mistress in her own house, and intruders have no idea who they are messing with.