The Sitter DVD Review

The Sitter, listed as While the Children Sleep on www.imdb.com, is a made for television movie that follows wealthy socialites Carter and Meghan. Carter (William R. Moses, The Adventures of Mary-Kate and Ashley: The Case of the Mystery Cruise, The Hangman’s Curse), a former District Attorney, decides to take a huge pay cut and enter into a partnership with his long time friend and business partner, Tate (Jon Robert Lindstrom, Must Love Dogs). The decrease in income inspires Meghan to return work, which creates a need to hire a nanny to care for the couple’s children.

Enter Abby, the perfect candidate for the nanny position. She is experienced, caring and is completely obsessed with Carter. She is hired and takes up residence in the family home and things seem to be moving along perfectly as she begins to play the couple against each other. Things get out of hand for Abby, however, when Tate makes a pass at her. Abby hastily reacts and kills Tate, convincingly covering up the death as an accidental car crash. Carter and Meghan are shaken but things quickly return to normal for everyone but the nosy next door neighbor. Abby ends up staging her death as a suicide, dropping a radio into the bathtub. Now in full force, Abby starts to manipulate Meghan (Gail O’Grady, Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo, She’s Having a Baby), up to and including tripping her down a staircase, breaking both of her ankles. Now the family needs to figure out a way to defeat Abby.

The Sitter is yet another film in which a person lies and manipulates their way into the lives of some poor unsuspecting family in an attempt to fulfill some sort of dark obsession. Abby, whose back story is very briefly shown at the very beginning of the film, became obsessed with Carter when he served as the district attorney in a case against Abby’s abusive mother when she was 8. In a painfully similar film, Rebecca DeMornay plays a hired nanny hell-bent to exact her revenge on the family of the man who prosecuted her husband, resulting in his suicide and her subsequent loss of all her assets. The Sitter plays like a melodrama, the performances are over the top and the dialog is corny. After Meghan finally defeats Abby, she announces to her tied up husband and children that “I have fired the babysitter!” Abby does everything but post a neon sign over her head to alert everyone that she is up to something insidious, while the killings of both Tate and the nosy neighbor ala Bewitched, are both unnecessary. The film goes from A to B without any basis in reality.

The Sitter on DVD is presented in widescreen and features a 5.1 stereo surround soundtrack. Other than being released in an unrated format, (it is uncertain what could have possibly been needed to be cut out as the film is very tame), there are absolutely no special features included on this DVD release.