3 out of 5

Directed by: Curtis Hanson

Ah, the humble thriller – how we took you for granted. Characters and setting established within a 2-hour timeline – enough to know them, know their names, know their outlines; let the actors fill in those outlines; and to know the shape of the spaces in which we’ll be entertained – and a plot executed and resolved within the same. Not 2.5 hours and a lot of pontificating bloat or CG; not six extra episodes of subplot filler. Is Curtis Hanson’s 1992 humble breakout hit (earning over ten times its budget of $11 million!) a great movie, or is it necessarily beyond that which, in 2026, we might see dumped onto a streaming service overnight? To the former: no; it’s pretty shaggy, but what we took for granted was how comparatively – to a current day proxy – seriously these films were taken back in the day, and to the latter: no, this is for most intents purposes exactly the kind of stuff haunting Netflix’s corners, but these answers also relate to one another: while there are talented, dedicated people making “humble thrillers” today, many of which are pretty dang good, they are also understandably made for a different audience – one which wouldn’t pay a full movie ticket price to see this in theaters, and that will be on to the next pretty-dang-good film possibly that same night. We see 1992’s version of “second screen” vibes when key plot points are spoken aloud by plotting babysitter Peyton (Rebecca De Mornay), and Graeme Revell’s classically swaying score functions as the constant, unobvious emotional cue in case you need to know when to look up for the tense bits, but still – there’s inevitably more time and relative cost sunk into such a movie back then, and you can feel / see it on the screen, especially when helmed by a skilled maestro like Hanson.

Also what we took for granted, probably always, and probably also in 1992 but one wonders if having a woman in the writing chair swayed things: that the men in this movie take the women seriously. When expecting mum Claire (Annabella Sciorra) is sexually assaulted by her new doctor during an exam, there is no extended “well are you sure that’s what happened?” sequence, which unfortunately would probably be more realistic, but it was nonetheless satisfying that her husband, Michael (Matt McCoy) backs her, and that her subsequent exposure of the assault to the press is picked up, supported by others, and published.

Thanks to the film’s smooth pacing, it’s… maybe easy too ignore that this ultimately is just a plotpoint to involve Peyton – the doctor’s wife – as any arguments that the film is about the imprint of trauma can be shushed away by this surely traumatic incident not being mentioned at all again, but at the very least, Claire continues to have a solid presence throughout, as does her friend Marlene (Julianne Moore), and as does, for sure, Peyton.

Because it’s a sequence of dominoes for her: the accusation leads to her husband’s suicide; the publicity and stress of / from the events possibly leads to Peyton’s miscarriage; and after the birth of Claire’s child, allows for Peyton to audition herself for being Claire’s and Michael’s nanny. (We also took for granted the convenience of pre-internet, when you might not know who the doctor’s wife is without going to the library and finding some old newspaper articles on microfiche.)

While the obsessive-female movie beats are contained within Hand That Rocks, I’d once again look to writer Amanda Silver for some very important tweaks to the formula that helped make this movie (then and now) stand out amongst that subgenre, and to Hanson and De Mornay for – if not exactly making Peyton sympathetic – allowing us to accept that she might not’ve come into Claire’s and Michael’s lives with outright plans to wreck anything: we see her curiosity, and yes, her anger, but it feels unclear to Peyton what she wants to do with that… until she starts doing it. It’s then a pretty damn successful knife twist (with a few eyerolling “well I guess that could happen” allowances) up until a pretty silly ending sequence that, again, works because of the talent on all sides of the camera.