6.5/10
I’ve watched The Babysitters twice. The 6.5 is for an uncomfortable indie drama that’s better than its reputation but never quite earns the seriousness it reaches for. The pacing is good. The acting is strong. The premise is murky in ways the film engages with directly instead of evading. The ending surprised me on first viewing and still landed differently than expected on the second.
The film isn’t a comedy. Some critics and marketing materials have positioned it as dark comedy, 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 doesn’t produce laughter. The film doesn’t ask for laughter. The “dark comedy” framing was a distribution-strategy choice that didn’t 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. Later 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 instead of fighting it. She doesn’t give the audience easy access to Shirley’s inner life. Critics complained about this as a writing failure. The complaint misreads the performance.
Shirley doesn’t know herself. The audience doesn’t 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 hasn’t yet figured out what she wants but has figured out how to get something. Waterston plays the distance as a character choice instead of as a writing gap.
The performance is one of the most committed early career performances by an actor who would go on to major 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 pathetic. The performance refuses to romanticize the character. Michael isn’t 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 doesn’t 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 tone too much information being absorbed at once. Gail is the film’s moral consciousness, even though she doesn’t intervene, even though she doesn’t confront Michael directly, even though she doesn’t 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 doesn’t give Gail dialogue confirming her suspicions. The script doesn’t show her finding evidence. The script doesn’t give her a confrontation scene. What the script gives her is a series of small moments in which she tones information that doesn’t 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’re writing a character who’s becoming aware of something they shouldn’t 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 instead of 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 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 doesn’t resolve which one is correct.
For Writers
The Babysitters shows 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’re 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 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 structure to the question of whether the framing was earned. The text supports the question instead of answering it.
The Premise Problem
The film depicts teenage prostitution. The protagonist is seventeen years old in the United States. That’s 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 doesn’t treat the situation as romance. The film doesn’t treat the men as decent. The film doesn’t glamorize the operation. What the film does is depict the situation with enough seriousness that the audience can’t dismiss it as exploitation in the older 1980s sense. The seriousness is part of what makes the material harder to watch than plain 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 won’t describe the specific resolution because the surprise is part of what gives the film its lingering effect on rewatch. What I’ll say is that the ending doesn’t provide the moral closure many viewers expect from the setup. Shirley doesn’t face the consequences the genre conventions would predict. Michael doesn’t face the consequences the moral structure would predict. Gail doesn’t act on what she’s been registering throughout the runtime.
The film closes on a note that some viewers find deep 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 doesn’t, in real life, resolve cleanly.
For Writers
The ending of The Babysitters shows 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 structure intact. The Babysitters refuses to provide any of these resolutions. The protagonist isn’t punished. The protagonist isn’t redeemed. The protagonist doesn’t visibly learn a lesson. The audience leaves uncertain about what they’ve 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 doesn’t warrant easy closure. If you’re 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, the most honest response to material that should leave the audience uncomfortable. Resist the temptation to provide false closure. Some stories shouldn’t 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 instead of its central failure. Others point to the performances as raising the material beyond the script’s reach. The split in critical response is honest. The film is 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 showed a specific quality that her later 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 wants. The Babysitters introduced the tone 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 doesn’t 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 instead of empty. The Babysitters introduced this skill to American indie cinema and Waterston has continued developing it across two decades of later 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.
Is The Babysitters worth watching?
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 good for a ninety-minute indie drama. The ending surprises in ways that linger past the closing credits.
I’ve 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 isn’t a comedy regardless of how it’s occasionally been marketed. The film is a drama about uncomfortable territory that asks the audience to engage seriously with the material instead of dismissing it as either exploitation or social commentary. The audience’s response to that ask is the audience’s own business.
Frequently Asked Questions
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