Trebuyetsya nyanya

Actress Marina Zubanova, who played the heroine of "With Love, Lilya," returns in Sadilova's new film as Galina, the nanny of its title. She is hired by a prosperous couple, businessman Andrei (Alexei Makarov) and his manager wife Vera (Viktoria Isakova), to look after their 4-year-old daughter Alya (Irina Shipova) as Vera prepares to return to work.
Most of the action takes place in and around the couple's country house, whose final construction is being completed by a gang of Uzbek workers. Sadilova's own script catches subtle details of the almost unspoken class system typically found in Russia over the last decade. Andrei and Vera may be successful and able to afford a new house and a housekeeper, but their interaction with others, such as their parents, whose much more modest lives have changed little over the years, anchors them in a convincing background.
Nor could the couple exactly be termed New Russians, since they show almost every possible consideration for those they employ. And their villa isn't the last word in luxury, either -- it's under an airport flight path, the noise of which comes to mirror the sense of distraction and unease that grows through the film.
The nanny Galina is recommended for the post by her aunt, the family's housekeeper. Bonding with Alya and kindly treated by her employers, Zubanova's character nevertheless soon betrays hints of jealousy. When she overhears a late-night exchange between the couple commenting on her figure -- Galina is a reasonably well-built lady -- that germ of envy brings on her further course of action, one that will come close to wrecking the family.
The scale of Galina's capacity for evil quickly becomes clear, as she frames the Uzbek builders for theft and conducts an ongoing campaign to subvert Alya. Prompted by her nanny's disturbing bedtime stories, the girl begins to see her world differently and gets caught up in her nanny's ill-intentioned web. Aware of existing tensions in the relationship between Andrei and Vera, Galina initiates one coup of particular cunning that precipitates plot strands involving blackmail and DNA tests, and a final twist that shows her scheming in an even more callous light.
Sadilova handles these slowly developing hidden secrets and jealousies well as they ferment under an apparently benign surface. This uneasy atmosphere is balanced by a sense of detail and location that even leads to some moments of comedy, since the atmosphere of the house and its surroundings, a lake nearby and a neighboring small town, seem outwardly so far from threatening.
Convincingly though such developments are shown, the film leaves viewers at its conclusion with a central question: What really motivates Galina to pursue such an evilly destructive path, in response to what might seem minor slights? Quite where she has learned such sinister, almost Machiavellian forms of interference remains unclear, given that her background remains unexplored.
The director has said that this was a conscious decision, stating that such evil can exist in a character a priori, without being nurtured by circumstances. Whether or not that explanation convinces, the film comes across as particularly chilling in the scenes of Galina's subtle manipulation of the child.
"Needing a Nanny" has commendably modest production values, but looks no less convincing for that. Its settings seem exactly like real-life ones that the viewer could step into today. With sparse music and naturalistic visual style, the environments speak for themselves, as does the acting. The child lead Shipova comes across as particularly impressive, but she is well supported by Zubanova and the film's wider cast. - themoscowtimes.com