The Ultimate Other Woman

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE Directed by Curtis Hanson

Screenplay by Amanda Silver

What profit political correctness if you've got a nut case for a nanny? That, in essence, is the issue confronting Claire and Michael Bartel (Annabella Sciorra and Matt McCoy), exemplary citizens of that citadel of the new civic punctiliousness, Seattle.

As we meet them, the Bartels (who are just a little bit too goopishly written and played) have one pluperfect daughter and are expecting what turns out to be an ideal little brother for her. Michael is a scientist doing what we understand to be socially useful research. Claire does volunteer work at the botanical gardens. Clearly they like to grow new things. At the same time, however, they have a decent respect for tradition: their house is a handsomely refurbished old place, tastefully decorated with antique mission furniture.

Not that good fortune dulls their sense of social responsibility. When they hire a handyman, he is (as they might prefer to put it) "differently abled" -- a sweet-souled retardate named Solomon (Ernie Hudson, in a nicely judged performance). When in the course of a prenatal examination Claire is sexually abused by a gynecologist, she comes to feel, after suitable soul searching, that she has no choice but to bring charges against the doctor in order to save others from her experience.

Big -- if entirely understandable -- mistake. For the ruined doctor commits suicide, and his wife Peyton (Rebecca De Mornay) suffers both a miscarriage and a descent into madness as a result of the trauma. Assuming a false name and a false air of accommodation, she turns up at the Bartels', seeking work as a mother's helper. And, of course, revenge.

Uh-oh, one thinks. Another deranged au pair from B-picture hell, stirring up our anxieties about the relative strangers to whom, in these busy times, we are obliged to entrust our children. But Peyton, whose mannerliness is lit by lightning flashes of rage, is something more than that. She is the ultimate Other Woman. Her aim -- at least in the beginning -- is not to terrorize but to estrange Claire from her family, strip her of husband, children and middle- class comforts, drive her out as Peyton herself has been driven out, and then move in and replace her.

The interloper, well played by De Mornay, is a subtle operative. Her weapons are purloined letters, ambiguously dropped phrases, plausibly planted evidence of misconduct. And Claire, though she lives by all the best values and tries hard to be supermom and superwife, has her vulnerabilities. She doesn't always have the energy to be sexy. Even minor stress brings on incapacitating asthma attacks.

Both containing and facing many of the contemporary middle-class woman's most common fears, Claire is not quite what she sometimes seems to be and always aspires to be. Something similar might be said about The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. It wants to be something more than a one-weekend stand for the slasher fans. Shrewdly conceived, soberly paced, decently squeamish about gore, it wants to get its true audience -- people very like the Bartels, when you come right down to it -- muttering into their Chardonnay about how this particular movie got them to thinking. And about how it just may be the first movie to combine, however tentatively, the seemingly antithetical conventions of feminist discourse and horror.