I recently watched an oddball Lifetime movie called "Nanny Seduction," in which virtually the only novelty or suspense value was attempting to guess which set of Lifetime clichés writer Marcy Holland would tap to resolve her next plot point. The film was directed by Emily Moss Wilson (Lifetime, to their credit, has given a lot of opportunities to women directors, and sometimes, as with Christine Conradt and Vanessa Parise, they've shown real talent that deserves a shot at major theatrical features; alas, Emily Moss Wilson is hardly in their league) and stars Wes Brown and Austin Highsmith (a woman named "Austin"?) as Ben and Kara Turling, who six months before the film began took on the formidable challenge of adopting an eight-year-old girl, Riley (Lauren Goluzzi in what's far and away the best acting job in the film!), even though she's relentlessly antisocial and virtually catatonic. The reason they've done this is that Kara herself grew up in foster homes and never got over the sheer trauma of being moved around so much and never being able to settle down in one home environment, with one set of parents, that could make her feel like she belonged. She's determined to make sure no one else has to go through that, so she singles out Riley and gives her a home. There's a scene between her and Ben in which she says she's forgiven him for the "mistake" he made a year ago — and if you've seen more than two Lifetime movies in your life you're instantly aware that the "mistake" he made was an affair. The plot kicks off when the live-in nanny the Turlings have been using, a grandmotherly Latina, announces that she's leaving because her daughter has just borne her a grandchild of her own, and so Kara has to hire a replacement.
We see her interviewing three people, two women and a man, and she ultimately hires the blonde woman even though her references were shakier than those of the black-haired woman — only the would-be nanny burns the sandwich she was frying for Riley, Riley refuses to eat it, but we see the nanny carefully turn off the stove burner — only a mysterious stranger sneaks into the house (apparently neither the Turlings nor anyone they've let into the house has ever heard of door locks, since intruders seem to breeze in and out of there all movie without so much as a by-your-leave) and turns the burner back on, starting a kitchen fire it looks like the nanny started by her negligence. So Kara lets her go and instead hires the dark-haired candidate, Alyssa (Valerie Azlynn), who turns out to have an agenda. Through much of the movie we're given a red herring — Riley's birth mother, Vanessa Shaw (Erin Cahill), who like Alyssa has also been stalking the Turlings, though not because she's after Ben (I had thought it might turn out that Ben was actually Riley's birth father, but screenwriter Holland fortunately didn't take us there) but because she simply wants to see Riley: she lost custody because her chronic alcoholism was leading her to neglect Riley, but now that she's clean, sober and working, she wants, if not full custody, at least some involvement in Riley's life. At least Holland didn't pull the trick of a sinister open-ended "surprise" ending like the writers of "The Wrong Neighbor," Jeffrey Schenck, Peter Sullivan and Robert Dean Klein, did, but "Nanny Seduction" is still pretty much a to-the-pattern Lifetime piece with little (aside from Lauren Gobuzzi's amazing performance as Riley — it's one of those shows in which you admire the child actor while at the same time wondering what long-term traumas are going to be caused by whatever director Wilson had to pull to get it from her) to distinguish or recommend it.
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