6.5/10
I have watched The Babysitters twice. The 6.5 reflects honest evaluation of an uncomfortable indie drama that is better than its reputation but never quite earns the seriousness it reaches for. The pacing is genuinely good. The acting is genuinely strong. The premise is murky in ways the film engages with directly rather than evading. The ending surprised me on first viewing and still landed differently than expected on the second.
The film is not a comedy. Some critics and marketing materials have positioned it as dark comedy, which is the wrong genre frame. The Babysitters is a drama about a high school senior who turns a sexual relationship with a married man into a prostitution business with her friends. The material does not produce laughter. The film does not ask for laughter. The “dark comedy” framing was a distribution-strategy choice that did not match the film’s actual tone, and the mismatch is part of why the film is harder to find than it should be.
The Setup
Shirley Lyner is a seventeen-year-old high school senior preparing for college applications and entrance exams. She babysits for the Beltran family on weekends to earn money for school. Michael Beltran is unhappy in his marriage to Gail. One night Michael drives Shirley home and they kiss. Subsequent encounters become sexual. Michael pays Shirley extra.
Shirley recognizes the financial opportunity. She recruits her friend Melissa, then Brenda, then others, into a babysitting service that doubles as a prostitution ring serving suburban married fathers. Shirley takes twenty percent as the operation’s manager. The business grows. The problems start when Brenda decides to quit, when Brenda’s tougher stepsister Nadine starts undercutting Shirley’s operation, and when Michael becomes possessive about Shirley’s relationships with other clients. Gail Beltran, throughout, senses something is wrong without being able to articulate it.
Katherine Waterston As Shirley
Waterston was twenty-seven years old when this film shot, playing seventeen. The performance is the film’s central engineering achievement. Shirley is written as opaque, calculating, and emotionally withholding. Waterston commits to the opacity rather than fighting it. She does not give the audience easy access to Shirley’s inner life. Critics complained about this as a writing failure. The complaint misreads the performance.
Shirley does not know herself. The audience does not get to know her either. What the audience reads instead is a young woman moving through her situation with the calculating distance of someone who has not yet figured out what she wants but has figured out how to get something. Waterston plays the distance as a character choice rather than as a writing gap. The performance is one of the most committed early career performances by an actor who would go on to substantial work in Inherent Vice in 2014, Steve Jobs in 2015, and the Fantastic Beasts films from 2016 onward.
John Leguizamo As Michael
Leguizamo plays Michael Beltran as genuinely pathetic. The performance refuses to romanticize the character. Michael is not a tragic figure trapped in a loveless marriage. Michael is a slimeball who recognizes his marriage has problems and decides the solution is sleeping with the seventeen-year-old who babysits for him. The performance is brave because Leguizamo does not protect the character. He plays Michael with the full ugliness the script provides.
The choice matters because most films about middle-aged-man and younger-woman affairs frame the man as conflicted, decent, or trapped. The Babysitters does none of those things. Michael is the antagonist of the film even though he never recognizes himself as one. Leguizamo’s willingness to play that without softening is one of the production’s most important decisions.
Cynthia Nixon As Gail
Nixon plays Gail Beltran as a woman who knows something is wrong without being able to identify what. The performance is subtle work. Small reactions. Brief silences. Eye movements that register too much information being absorbed at once. Gail is the film’s moral consciousness, even though she does not intervene, even though she does not confront Michael directly, even though she does not protect Shirley.
Nixon was at the height of her Sex and the City fame in 2007 and could have chosen any number of higher-profile projects. She chose this indie role specifically because the character had this kind of internal complexity. The performance is one of the film’s three central achievements and is what gives the suburban-marriage portion of the story its weight.
For Writers
Cynthia Nixon’s Gail Beltran is a masterclass in writing a character who knows without being told. The script does not give Gail dialogue confirming her suspicions. The script does not show her finding evidence. The script does not give her a confrontation scene. What the script gives her is a series of small moments in which she registers information that does not quite make sense, and Nixon plays the accumulating registration without ever spelling it out. The lesson for writers is that knowing characters can be more powerful than informed characters. A character who suspects without confirming maintains tension. A character who knows because the plot told them loses tension immediately. If you are writing a character who is becoming aware of something they should not yet be aware of, resist the temptation to give them a discovery scene. Let them accumulate awareness through small registrations. The reader will feel the accumulation alongside the character. The shared awareness becomes the source of tension rather than any single confrontation.
The Entrepreneurial Framing
The film’s structural innovation is treating Shirley’s prostitution business as a business. Shirley does the math. Shirley sets the commission. Shirley recruits employees. Shirley manages relationships with clients. Shirley deals with personnel problems when Brenda wants to quit and Nadine starts competing. The script presents these moments with the procedural matter-of-factness of any small-business operation, except the business is teen sex work.
The framing is deeply uncomfortable and deliberately so. Most films about young women in sex work frame the women as victims or as morally compromised survivors. The Babysitters frames Shirley as an entrepreneur whose business happens to involve sex work. The framing is one of the reasons the film generates the responses it generates. Some viewers read this as a feminist treatment of agency. Other viewers read this as exploitation dressed up as social commentary. Both readings are available in the text and the film does not resolve which one is correct.
For Writers
The Babysitters demonstrates how a structural framing choice can change how morally compromised material reads. By presenting Shirley’s operation through the language of entrepreneurship, the film generates two simultaneous readings the audience must navigate. The first reading is Shirley as competent businesswoman exercising agency in a corrupt market. The second reading is Shirley as a teenager being exploited by adults who have constructed an economy around her exploitation. Both readings are available because the framing supports both. The lesson is that structural framing creates the reader’s interpretive frame more powerfully than any individual scene. If you are writing morally compromised material, the framing you choose will determine whether readers see your protagonist as exercising agency or being exploited, regardless of what the events of the story actually depict. Choose the framing deliberately. Be aware of what the framing implies. The Babysitters chose the entrepreneurship frame and lives with the consequences of that choice. The reader brings their own moral framework to the question of whether the framing was earned. The text supports the question rather than answering it.
The Premise Problem
The film depicts teenage prostitution. The protagonist is seventeen years old in the United States, which is at the legal age of consent in some states and not in others. The actresses playing the teenagers were generally older (Waterston was twenty-seven, the other ensemble members were in their twenties). The film is more careful than Angel (1984) about not sexualizing its actresses on screen, but the underlying premise still involves seventeen-year-old characters in sexual relationships with significantly older married men, framed as a business arrangement the teenagers are actively managing.
Contemporary audiences responding to the film have to engage with this directly. The film does not treat the situation as romance. The film does not treat the men as decent. The film does not glamorize the operation. What the film does is depict the situation with enough seriousness that the audience cannot dismiss it as exploitation in the older 1980s sense. The seriousness is part of what makes the material harder to watch than straightforward exploitation would be. The audience is being asked to take the premise seriously and to draw moral conclusions about it. Different viewers will draw different conclusions. The film is more honest about the discomfort than many comparable films of its era.
The Ending
The third act delivers a surprise. I will not describe the specific resolution because the surprise is part of what gives the film its lingering effect on rewatch. What I will say is that the ending does not provide the moral closure many viewers expect from the setup. Shirley does not face the consequences the genre conventions would predict. Michael does not face the consequences the moral framework would predict. Gail does not act on what she has been registering throughout the runtime. The film closes on a note that some viewers find profound and other viewers find evasive.
The surprise is the choice. The film could have given the audience a redemption arc or a punishment arc. Instead it gives the audience an ambiguous resolution that asks the audience to decide what to make of the story without telling them what to make of it. The choice is part of why the film generates such polarized critical responses. Some viewers read the ending as the film abandoning its responsibility to its premise. Other viewers read the ending as the film refusing to provide false closure for a situation that does not, in real life, resolve cleanly.
For Writers
The ending of The Babysitters demonstrates the cost and value of withholding catharsis. Most films with morally compromised premises end by providing closure. The protagonist is punished. The protagonist is redeemed. The protagonist learns a lesson. The audience leaves with their moral framework intact. The Babysitters refuses to provide any of these resolutions. The protagonist is not punished. The protagonist is not redeemed. The protagonist does not visibly learn a lesson. The audience leaves uncertain about what they have just watched. The choice is risky. Audiences expect catharsis. Audiences resent withholding. But the choice is also the most morally serious option the writer can take when the material does not warrant easy closure. If you are writing material that would be falsified by a clean ending, consider whether the readers’ frustration with the ambiguity is the actual purpose of your story. The Babysitters keeps the audience uncomfortable past the closing credits, which is the most honest response to material that should leave the audience uncomfortable. Resist the temptation to provide false closure. Some stories should not be closed.
Critical Reception
The film received mixed reviews on release and has remained polarized in retrospective coverage. The IMDb rating of 5.6 reflects the lower end of viewer response. Slant Magazine’s review called the film “sordid sensationalism” and argued that David Ross was indulging in the exploitation the film pretended to critique. Rotten Tomatoes’s critical consensus called the film “audacious and controversial” but said it “teeters between exploitation and grossness due to uneven execution.”
The more positive readings have come from viewers and critics willing to engage with the film’s specific structural choices. Some defenders argue that the entrepreneurial framing is the film’s central insight rather than its central failure. Others point to the performances as elevating the material beyond the script’s reach. The split in critical response is honest. The film is genuinely both more interesting than its reputation suggests and more compromised than its defenders argue. Both readings have textual support.
Craft: Katherine Waterston As Indie Discovery
Craft Note
The Babysitters is Katherine Waterston’s discovery performance. She was twenty-seven years old, the daughter of veteran actor Sam Waterston, and had been working in theater and minor film roles for several years without breaking out. The Babysitters was her first major lead. The performance demonstrated a specific quality that her subsequent career would build on: emotional opacity as character work.
Waterston’s later career validates the reading. Paul Thomas Anderson cast her in Inherent Vice (2014) as Shasta Fay Hepworth, a character whose emotional withholding is the film’s central mystery. Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs (2015) cast her as Chrisann Brennan, Jobs’s ex-partner whose suppressed anger drives the family dynamic. The Fantastic Beasts films from 2016 onward cast her as Tina Goldstein, a character whose competence is consistently undermined by her difficulty expressing what she actually wants. The Babysitters introduced the register Waterston has spent her career refining.
The craft lesson is that emotional opacity is a specific actorly skill that requires the same commitment as more demonstrative performance modes. Waterston does not play Shirley as cold by withholding affect. She plays Shirley as cold by giving the character a specific interior life that the audience is denied access to. The audience reads Shirley as opaque because the actor has built something for the audience not to see. This is harder than it appears. Most actors trying to play opacity simply hold back. Waterston builds the inner life and then walls it off. The wall is the performance. The wall is also what makes the character feel real rather than empty. The Babysitters introduced this skill to American indie cinema and Waterston has continued developing it across two decades of subsequent work. The film is worth watching as a character study, as a moral inquiry, and as the discovery moment for one of the more interesting American screen actors of her generation.
The Verdict
A 6.5. The Babysitters is a better film than its mixed reputation suggests and a more compromised film than its defenders argue. The performances are strong across the central trio of Waterston, Leguizamo, and Nixon. The entrepreneurial framing is structurally innovative even if it generates legitimate moral discomfort. The pacing is genuinely good for a ninety-minute indie drama. The ending surprises in ways that linger past the closing credits.
I have watched it twice. The second viewing was harder than the first because I knew where it was going and had to sit with the deliberateness of every choice the film makes. The 6.5 reflects that experience: a film that achieves something specific and pays a real cost in moral comfort for the achievement. Other viewers will respond differently. The split in critical response is built into the material.
The film is not a comedy regardless of how it has occasionally been marketed. The film is a drama about uncomfortable territory that asks the audience to engage seriously with the material rather than dismissing it as either exploitation or social commentary. The audience’s response to that ask is the audience’s own business.
FAQ
Is The Babysitters a comedy?
No. The film has been marketed in some contexts as a dark comedy and the framing has stuck in some critical coverage, but the actual tone of the film is dramatic. The events are not played for laughs. The characters are not comic figures. The situations are not absurd. The film treats its premise with seriousness throughout. The comedy framing is a distribution-strategy artifact that does not match the film’s actual register.
Who directed and wrote the film?
David Ross wrote and directed The Babysitters as his feature directorial debut. He had previously worked as a documentary filmmaker. The Babysitters was his first narrative feature and is his most prominent credit. He has not directed another major feature in the years since, though he has continued to work in independent production.
How old are the characters versus the actors?
The lead character Shirley Lyner is seventeen years old. Katherine Waterston was twenty-seven at the time of filming. The other ensemble members playing teenage characters were generally in their twenties. The age gaps between actors and characters were larger than is standard for contemporary American filmmaking and reflect a casting practice that has become less common since 2007. The decision to cast adult actors as teenagers was partly a practical labor-law consideration and partly an aesthetic choice that the film does not apologize for.
Is the entrepreneurial framing meant as feminist commentary?
The film does not answer the question directly. The framing presents Shirley as exercising agency over her own situation, which can be read as a feminist treatment of teenage decision-making. The framing also presents Shirley as a teenager whose agency is being exercised within a system constructed by adult men who benefit from her exploitation, which can be read as a critique of how that agency is constrained. Both readings have textual support. The film leaves the question open rather than answering it.
What is Cynthia Nixon’s role in the film?
Nixon plays Gail Beltran, the wife of Michael Beltran, who is having the affair with Shirley that becomes the basis for the prostitution operation. Gail spends the film registering increasingly disturbing information about her husband and her household without confronting him directly. The performance is one of the film’s three central achievements and gives the suburban-marriage portion of the story emotional weight. Nixon was at the height of her Sex and the City fame when she made this film and chose the role specifically because of its complexity.
How does the film compare to Lolita or similar material?
The Babysitters is sometimes positioned as a contemporary engagement with the Lolita literary tradition. The comparison is imperfect. The film is not narrated from the adult man’s perspective. The film does not romanticize the relationship. The film does not lyricize the language. The film maintains a flat, observational register throughout. Viewers approaching the film expecting Nabokovian aesthetic complexity will not find it. Viewers approaching the film expecting a procedural depiction of a specific American suburban dynamic will find that.
What happens at the end?
The film closes on a deliberately ambiguous note that does not provide the moral resolution many viewers expect from the setup. The specific events of the ending are best experienced rather than described. What can be said is that the ending refuses to punish or redeem the protagonist in the conventional ways, refuses to confirm or deny what Gail does or does not know, and leaves the audience to make their own interpretive choices about what the film has been arguing throughout. Some viewers find the ambiguity profound. Other viewers find it evasive. Both responses are valid.
Is the film worth watching despite the difficult premise?
Depends on the viewer’s tolerance for morally compromised material handled with seriousness rather than comic distance. Viewers who can engage with difficult premises as dramatic inquiry will find the performances strong, the pacing genuine, and the ending lingering. Viewers who require moral clarity from their films will likely find The Babysitters frustrating. The 6.5 rating reflects honest reading: a film that achieves something specific and pays a real cost for the achievement, recommended for viewers who can engage with that trade.
Where can the film be watched?
The Babysitters has been available intermittently on streaming services including Prime Video and various subscription rentals. The film is not currently easy to find on physical media. Distribution rights have shifted over the years since its 2007 release. Viewers interested in seeing it should check their local streaming options at the time of viewing rather than rely on availability information from the original release period.