Lauren Cohan of “The Walking Dead” does her best, though, to take her role seriously through all its implausible twists and turns. She stars as Greta, a pretty, young American who travels to a remote English village to take a job as a nanny for an 8-year-old boy. Seems she’s got a troubled romantic past and needs to get as far away from home as possible; what she finds, though, is that she’s far away from everything else, too. When she pulls up in a chauffeured car to the Heelshires’ stately, intimidating manor, she remarks in awe: “It’s like something out of a storybook, isn’t it?” Actually, it’s like something out of every Gothic horror movie you’ve ever seen, complete with wild, misty grounds, dark stairways, hidden passages and things that go bump in the night.
When Greta meets the rigid, conservatively dressed Heelshires (veterans Jim Norton and Diana Hardcastle), who look more like the grandparents of an 8-year-old boy than the parents, she receives a strict list of rules and a routine to which she must adhere. She also meets the boy himself – who isn’t a boy at all but rather a china doll with a prim wardrobe of tiny suits and cardigans and a glassy stare. But the Heelshires, who’ve named him Brahms, treat him like a living, breathing child. They talk to him. They feed him. They carry him up and down stairs, play classical records for him and tuck him into bed at night.
“Oh, Brahms! You must sit up straight,” his mother gently scolds at one point. Later she coos, “Mommy’s so proud of you.” Ostensibly, the matter-of-fact way in which these genteel, wealthy people regard what is clearly a toy is meant to be unnerving. Are they deranged or diabolical? And Greta, as our stand-in, expresses all the skepticism and apprehension that we would in this bizarre situation. But she needs the money, so she takes the job. (Although how she found out about the gig from her small town in Montana is a mystery; the Heelshires have no Internet or cell service and seem to have stopped communicating with the outside world decades ago.)
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