A few days ago, thriller fans had their first opportunity to watch the Hulu remake of a hit ’90s title. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle presents a modern rendition of the 1992 psychological horror thriller that took audiences by surprise with its gripping approach to the “nefarious babysitter” trope. The 2025 version is based on a similar premise, with Maika Monroe’s Polly arriving at the home of Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Caitlyn to babysit her children while hiding sinister motivations. But that’s the only thing it shares with the film that inspired it — and that was completely intentional, according to the film’s stars and its director, Michelle Garza Cervera.
Cervera, Monroe, and Winstead spoke with Comic Book while promoting The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, which arrived on Hulu October 22. The film follows wife and mother Caitlyn Morales as she accepts the help of a former client named Polly, who poses as a babysitter sharing her views. As the story unfolds, viewers realize Polly has an agenda, and it’s far from friendly.
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is inspired by Amanda Silver’s 1992 script, which resulted in Curtis Hanson’s film starring Rebecca De Mornay, Annabella Sciorra, Madeleine Zima, Matt McCoy, Ernie Hudson, and Julianne Moore. The original sees De Mornay’s Peyton arriving at the Bartel household to take care of the children while hiding a dark past. It sounds similar to the new premise, but the 2025 version strongly differs in terms of the villain’s motivation. Cervera talked about the 1992 version, and though she admits to rewatching the movie, she stopped halfway through to come up with her own thing:
“You know when they first approached me with the project, I rewatched it just to see what was there that I could play with, but then the moment I got the project I stopped watching it and I also asked the crew to not watch it and not be comparing ourselves or our film with that.
“Because I feel like if you try to create any creative form, to have a creative process, it’s very hard when you’re working on it as a comparison to something else. I think that’s not healthy and it’s not even respectful of your own team and your own processes. I feel like you really need to start responding to your own themes that you want to explore personally and your own characters and story at the end of the day, so yeah, on a moment I think we all forgot it was a remake.”
Maika Monroe and Mary Elizabeth Winstead Collide as Polly and Caitlyn in ‘The Hand That Rocks the Cradle’
Monroe is Polly, the apparently perfect babysitter who enters the Morales family and sends them down a spiral of paranoia and violence because of a past event we won’t spoil. The It Follows actor says she feels her version is entirely different from the 1992 feature:
“I had seen the film prior, but I didn’t rewatch it when I knew I was going to be a part of this. I just feel it’s really so completely different. I mean it feels like a completely different movie besides the surface level of a nanny comes to a house and wreaks havoc, but beyond that, it feels like a completely different film to me.”
Winstead, who plays Caitlyn, the mother and wife who sees Monroe’s Polly for what she actually is, says she felt the same when comparing the 2025 film to the original:
“I hadn’t seen the original, but I was aware of it, just the genre that it was and the feeling that it evoked in people. I definitely was aware of it, because most people are. It’s kind of an iconic title. And then when I read the script and fell in love with the script, I looked up the original and I kind of was comparing the two just reading the synopsis and going, ‘Okay, this is a very different film.’
“I don’t think they live in the same worlds so much, even though the plot, like you said that basic through line is there.”
- Release Date
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October 22, 2025
- Director
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Michelle Garza Cervera
- Writers
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Micah Bloomberg, Amanda Silver
- Producers
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Michael Schaefer, Mike LaRocca, Ted Field