The Captive Nanny 2020 * * * Stars

Director: Amy S. Weber
Year: 2020
Rated NR
Rating: * * * Stars
Cast: Karynn Moore, Austin Highsmith, Michael Aaron Milligan

"I think they're gonna kill me". Oh yeah, that's reassuring. I guess I'll check au pair off my career list.

Anyway, 2020's The Captive Nanny is my latest review. And in the tradition of the entity in The Amityville Horror yelling "get out!", I felt compelled to say the same thing to the pushover childminder in "Captive". Heck, she needn't be in that reconnaissance house for more than a half hour (hint, hint).

Clocking in at a running time of 100 minutes (with brief commercials) and billed as a thriller with a touch of the "violence of the mind", The Captive Nanny's layered plot goes like this: A young woman who can't adopt and ends up splitting from her boyfriend, decides to take a job as a live-in nanny with a creepy family bent on watching her every move. When said family loses said woman's trust, they confine her to her room and hold her against her will.

The performances in "Captive" are solid with Karynn Moore playing nanny Chloe and Austin Highsmith and Michael Aaron Milligan playing psychotic parents Emily and Michael. Highsmith is the standout and she slowly slides off rails channeling snide villainy, mild rage, and tortured manipulation.

Watching The Captive Nanny, you eventually want her to suffer because she's also a cuckoo stalker. You want Highsmith's Emily to get what's coming to her and its defeating that Moore's Chloe doesn't have the gumption to at least fight back or break a darn window.

"Captive", with all its Flowers in the Attic leavings and its ode to all things invasion of privacy, is one of your more effective Lifetime movie endeavors. It's frustrating, upsetting, gnawing, and bends the spectrum of TV-made, psychological terror. Observing The Captive Nanny in all its crippled sterility, you feel as if you are also "under lock and key". Rating: 3 stars. 

Written by Jesse Burleson