The Nanny’s Night (2021) Review

Right from the start, The Nanny’s Night has an odd feel to it. That may be because while the film was made in Spain by director Ignacio López (Vampus Horror Tales) and co-writer/supervising screenwriter Pedro Rivero (The Platform, Birdboy: The Forgotten Children) and a Spanish cast, it was filmed in English to match its American setting. The accents and ideas of what passes for typical American conversation make it seem like it’s set in an alternate version of the USA and made it hard to get into the film.

The Nanny’s Night’s opening scenes are in a “supermarket” that looks more like a tiny corner store. Bianka (Ana Garberí, El Cid) is chatting with a friend, doing her best to find out if she slept with the guy she was making out with at a party. Her determination seeming to go beyond the usual dirty-minded curiosity. It feels even odder as she’s having it while doing some shopping for the babysitting job she has that night.

She’ll be watching Nicole (Vivian Milkova) who seems a bit old to need a nanny. But her parents Sam (Juan Carlos Vellido, The Devil’s Backbone, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales) and Paquita (Diana Peñalver, Dead Alive, Beneath Still Waters) don’t trust her on her own. By the end of this night, they’ll wish they had.

The first half-hour of The Nanny’s Night moves extremely slowly. Apart from a clip of Night of the Living Dead on TV, it’s not until Nicole relates a tale about an escaped killer, which we see as a primitive animation, that there’s any horror to be found. Up until that point, it’s lame jokes about Sam trying to flirt with Bianca, or Bianca tossing all the rules set for her out the window.

And it’s not until Bianka’s friend Charlie (Almudena Salort, 32 Malasaña Street, Yerma: Barren) arrives that we find out the girls worship the demon Lucifera (María Forqué, A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio) and plan to sacrifice a virgin to her that things start getting interesting. Or not, depending on your sense of humor.

The jokes are all over the place, from realizing they forgot the duct tape to silence their victim or posing for a pre-sacrifice selfie to a shot of fancy underwear getting captioned “Fucking Rich Person Lingerie”. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any of this funny, their bumbling and squabbling were much more annoying than funny. And the scene involving Bianca, Charlie, and a pizza delivery guy (Javier Bódalo, Night of the Virgin, Ghost Graduation) felt like it went on forever.

To be fair, the final minutes of The Nanny’s Night do manage a sort of Home Alone as a Satanic Panic feel. But that’s way too late to save the film, even with a couple of nicely done gore shots involving bear traps and nail guns. And the film even manages to waste that with a final attempt at a twist that is utterly predictable although a mid-credit scene hints it might be leading into a sequel. Which would be even worse.

Whether the script never was funny or the humour got lost in translation I’m not sure, but The Nanny’s Night didn’t make me laugh once. And there’s about as much in the way of scares as there are laughs. The film never really tries to be scary despite being an alleged horror-comedy. And for a film revolving around sacrificing a virgin to a lesbian demon, there’s little in the way of sleaze either.

As much as I’m not a fan of McG, he handled the whole satanic babysitter idea so much better than The Nanny’s Night does. You’ll have more fun rewatching it than watching this.

Devilworks has released The Nanny’s Night on VOD and Digital platforms as well as DVD. You can check their website for more information. And if you’re looking for something to do with your night, FilmTagger has a few suggestions.