Control Nathan Rabin #131 Midnight's Child (1992)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. 

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

I appreciate the hell out of every single Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 pledge but some of the choices I find a little perplexing. The rightfully obscure 1992 television movie Midnight’s Child is one such head-scratcher. 

It’s a television movie, for starters. Almost by definition, those tend to be less distinctive, interesting and memorable than their theatrically released peers. 

Midnight’s Child is bad, alright but it’s not energetically, flamboyantly terrible enough to be worth recommending for unintentional guffaws. Finally, the TV movie’s biggest star is probably the actress who was least known at the time of its release: a big eyed, spooky little girl and celebrity Scientologist (a redundant phrase, to be sure!) billed as Elissabeth Moss but who rocketed to stardom as the star of Mad Men, US, The Invisible Man and The Handmaid’s Tale once she dropped the extra S and stopped making movies where she played Satan’s child bride. 

This perplexing horror-thriller doesn’t even tip its hand that it’s about Satan worshipping until seventy-two minutes in, though it does drop hints in the form of myriad references to a “Prince” who turns out to be THE Prince of Darkness, AKA Beezlebub, AKA the Anti-Christ, AKA The Great Deceiver, AKA Donald Trump. 

Before that reveal, Midnight’s Child fits snugly and unimaginatively into another sordid sub-genre: the Fatal Attraction-derived thriller of sexual paranoia where the American nuclear family is threatened by a sensual, sinister outsider who weaves her way deep into the fabric of their everyday lives for the purpose of destroying them. 

In Midnight’s Child, that sensual, sinister outsider is Anna Bergman (The Wonder Years’ Olivia D’Abo), a disturbed young Swedish woman who leaves her old life and her old identity in the best possible way: by bludgeoning her roommate, stealing her identity, then leaving her to die a fiery death in an explosion as she walks away in slow motion, a sociopathic smile on her face. 

Anna heads to the United States, where she tricks her way into a position as the new au pair for seven year old girl Christina (Moss), the only child of a wealthy family with a preposterously large house.

Kate (Marcy Walker) is, in blatant defiance of God’s will, the breadwinner of the family, a hard-charging businesswoman whose life is full of meetings and contracts and long hours at the office and all manner of other generic signifiers of workaholism. 

This leaves hubby Nick (Cotter Smith) to work from home on sketches for movie-related projects while Anna attends to their spooky-eyed little girl. 

Anna has a rough first day during which she exhibits a level of professional incompetence seldom seen outside of the films of Jerry Lewis but she quickly makes a spectacular transition from sub-par to superstar. 

Before long Anna is dazzling the family with her homemade lingonberry wine, elaborate home-cooked meals and wide-ranging talents. The husband is blown away by Anna’s drawings. The daughter is mesmerized by her tales of being married to a powerful and seductive prince. And the mother is intimidated by Anna’s youth, her beauty and her close bond with her daughter. 

H.R Gag Me With a Spoon!

For a movie about a Satan-worshipping Swedish seductress’ plans to recruit a child bride for the devil, Midnight’s Child is perversely uneventful. Much of the film’s 90 minute runtime is devoted to Anna being just a little too good to not be a devil-diddling usurper and Kate growing increasingly paranoid as Anna increasingly replaces her in the hearts and lives of her family. 

Midnight’s Child mistakes Kate’s mounting suspicion about Anna’s motives for mounting suspense and nothing happening for ever-increasing tension. 

When we don’t like someone for reasons we have a hard time articulating, or out of an ugly, deeply personal sense of jealousy, we welcome information that affirms our dislike. So you can only imagine how excited, as well as terrified, Kate is to get an urgent call from Anna’s father with some alarming news: Anna is a devil worshipper who came to the United States to flee consequences for her crimes but also so that she can find a child for Satan to marry on her eighth birthday. 

Sure enough, when a distraught Kate returns home she walks in on a Satanic ritual in which Anna and Nick are getting ready to marry Christina off to the devil. 

As you might imagine, Kate feels more than a little betrayed. Nick flat out denied having an affair with the sexy au pair and now he’s beaming with pride as his precious daughter gets ready for an unholy union with the Prince of Lies. 

When a horrified Kate asks Nick why he chose to become the devil’s father-in-law in a reverse Petey Wheatstraw type situation, he angrily informs her, “I wanted my career back. And Christina will be set for life.” 

As QAnon folks will be happy to tell you, in order to make it in Hollywood, or Democratic politics, you’re going to have to literally get into bed with the devil. Pledging eternal devotion to Satan is the cost of entry for even the most modest career in film. You can’t even be a regularly employed gaffer unless you’ve tasted the sweet, sweet blood of the innocent in at least a ritual or two.

But when Kate tells Nick that Anna killed someone he immediately has a change of heart. “I didn’t know that!” he insists with a forcefulness and sense of outrage that suggests that while he’s perfectly fine with his eight year old daughter marrying the devil, murder is a deal breaker.

While Anna hisses to Kate of her daughter’s new satanic master, “She’s his servant now! She answers only to him!” hubby comes to his senses and starts fighting Anna. 

Midnight’s Child ends with another fiery blaze as Anna is seemingly defeated, only to turn up unharmed and ready to begin the cycle again with an unfortunate new family that picks her up as a hitch-hiker. 

That’s too bad because I would love to hear the conversation around the breakfast table the next morning where Nick sheepishly explains to his rightly horrified wife, “Look, I’m not going to lie. I made a HUGE mistake trying to marry our child off to the devil. I’m not even going to try to justify it. It was just the wrong thing to do. But I want to make it right. So I don’t care how much laundry I have to do, or how many foot massages it will require: I’m going to make it up to you. And I promise not to marry our daughter to any supernatural being, good or bad. It’s only humans from here on out, and I’m also going to wait until she’s of age. I’ve been a bad boy, but I’m going to be good from here on out.”

The last fifteen minutes of Midnight’s Child are so batshit insane that they nearly redeem the 75 minutes of TV movie sluggishness leading up to them.  

You’ve got to give the devil his due: once the Prince of Darkness enters the picture, Midnight’s Child becomes trashy, campy fun but by then it’s too little, too late. 

QAnon’s obsession with child abuse and Satanism should lend Midnight’s Child a certain timeliness but the truth is that American entertainment, just like American culture, has always been obsessed with the devil, just as we’ve long been distrustful of working mothers for explicitly sexist, reactionary reasons. When these two unfortunate obsessions coalesce, as they do here, the result is less transcendent than ridiculous. 

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