Anything is scarier than a baby monitor

Baby Monitor: Sound of Fear 1998

I want to understand the headspace of screenwriter Edgar von Cossart (no, he’s not a vampire - I checked) when he came up with Baby Monitor: Sound of Fear because even by low budget 90s movie standards this story is greatly misguided and strange. While I was hoping that this would be some kind of horror movie, it is attempting to be a run-of-the-mill domestic invasion thriller. Tag line: “She was hired to watch the children. Now someone is watching her.”

The movie stars Josie Bissett as Ann who is supposed to be the protagonist but totally unlikeable. Ann is a nanny who is having an affair with the father of the household “Matt” (Jason Beghe). Early in the story it is revealed Matt’s wife Carol learns that Ann is pregnant with Matt’s child, therefore revealing the affair to her as well as the audience.

In the story Matt and Carol go out to some kind of rich people party. Meanwhile out of nowhere inept goons decide to invade Matt & Carol’s condo to hold the child Peter for ransom. Except they invaded the wrong condo. The “wrong condo” they invaded also has an adult woman and similar aged child, and that plot point exists basically to allow Ann and Peter to hear scary goon noises through the baby monitor from the other condo, therefore actualizing the promise of the idiotic title. The goons eventually correct their mistake and chase after Ann and Peter, but that really isn’t important.

What IS important is the characters the filmmaker wants the audience to feel sympathy for, and the strange values of the screenwriter. Clearly the filmmaker wants us to feel sympathy for the nanny (Ann) and the dad (Matt), even though they are having an affair. Meanwhile we are supposed to dislike Carol because she is career oriented and doesn’t spend much time with son Peter. At every turn we are supposed to hate on Carol: for being career driven, coming from privilege, and for having dreams outside of being a mother. Really this character never neglects Peter, or is a bad mother or wife.

Despite her coming from privilege, it is revealed she is the one who hired the goons. The filmmakers never established a reasonable motive for this move: I guess she wanted to scare Matt into breaking it off with Ann using this extremely risky plan that put her whole family in danger. It’s completely unbelievable. To cap it off Carol ends up trying to Kill Ann herself. What the actual fuck.

I love my bad movies to have a misguided or idiotic message. The message here is that women should only be focused on motherhood else she is a bad person who does not deserve sympathy and they are crazy people.