Lynn Collins and Brooke Bloom in Lucy. Photo: Joan Marcus
Surely we’ve all seen our share of malevolent-nanny movies. My favorite dates back to 1965, when Bette Davis, as The Nanny, inspired horror with her butter-wouldn’t-melt Brit manners and ferociously untamed eyebrows.
Lynn Collins plays Ashling, a modern-day child-minder, in the new Audible production Lucy, written and directed by Erica Schmidt, whose schoolgirl Mac Beth in 2019 in elicits chills to this day. If only this latest venture were half so unsettling!
Ashling – she notes that it’s an old Irish name – doesn’t initially present as particularly threatening. Sure, with her throwback-hippie clothes and over-familiar manner, she comes across as flaky, especially compared to Brooke Bloom’s Mary, a conventional type whose wardrobe and apartment cleave rigidly to tasteful neutrals. Mary is a radiologist with surprisingly little insight into human interiority, given the disconcerting hints that Ashling – which is to say, Schmidt as author – strews liberally throughout the script.
It’s a puzzlement, why Mary would be drawn to someone so flamboyant – not to mention vulgar (Ashling’s speech is peppered with catchphrases like “you betcha” and “no problemo”). Is it the supposed attraction of opposites? Is Mary perhaps craving some wildness of her own? Or is she just desperate? In any case, Ashling secures the post with this distinctly non-PC boast: “I’m American. I’m white. I’m a career nanny. Believe me, I get it. I’m a unicorn.”
A lengthy negotiation about scheduling and salary ensues (Mary drives a hard, boring bargain), and Ashling is hired on to look after six-year-old Lucy plus the little brother-to-be filling Mary’s stylish black overalls to the bursting point: she’s due in a week.
Why Lucy deserves billing as the title character remains a mystery. The child (played by alternating girls) does turn up from time to time, but we don’t see Lucy and Ashling interacting much; nor do we get a clear explanation as to why Lucy comes to view Ashling as a witch. Could Lucy be right? (That archaic name might contain a clue.) The script is elliptical: Who’s to know what Ashling is up to when Mary’s off at work?
Accruing evidence suggests that Ashling may be, at minimum, an appropriator in the Single White Female mode. She certainly oversteps in myriad ways, minor to major. But perhaps she’s even more malevolent than meets the eye, and is in fact secretly intent on offing the inconvenient little girl in order to get her hands on Mary’s newborn son, the unseen (but oft-heard) Maxy. Ashling does admit, disconcertingly, that she has a thing for a “sweetie sweetie sweetie boy.” She also confesses that she feels bereft now that her most recent charge has aged out – at fifteen.
Wouldn’t that plaint alone set off the teeniest alarm? Mary keeps shrugging off one ill omen after another. We get it: Good, reliable childcare is hard to come by, whatever the price and the pileup of red flags. But to us, the audience, Ashling is clearly a nut job. What will finally push Mary over the edge?
You can count on one inevitability: The showdown will come accompanied by a couple of unanticipated revelations, held back too long and to less-than-staggering effect.
Lucy opened February 6, 2023, at the Minetta Lane Theatre and runs through February 25. Tickets and information: audible.com
