The Babysitters (2008)

David Ross's The Babysitters arrived in 2008 with a premise engineered to scandalize and little else on its mind. Shirley, a seventeen-year-old entrepreneur played by Katherine Waterston, converts a routine sitting job into a small franchise of teenage companionship for dissatisfied married men, complete with business cards and a twenty percent cut skimmed off the top. The film treats this as a grim little parable about commerce and boredom, and it is careful never to suggest that anyone involved is a victim or that the arrangement deserves a moral audit from the audience.

The cast includes faces a modern studio would proudly foreground, yet the film asks them to do nothing representative. Cynthia Nixon plays the neglected wife, John Leguizamo the restless husband, and the teenage girls are written as operators, not symbols. No character pauses to explain structural inequality. No one delivers a speech about consent, labor, or the patriarchy. The transactions are sordid, and the film's attitude toward them sits closer to a shrug than a sermon. It is provocative without being instructive, which is its own kind of honesty.

This is a film from a moment before the culture decided that every story needed a thesis stapled to it. It is exploitation dressed in indie-film restraint, and its discomfort comes from how little it editorializes. There is no environmental conscience, no body-positive aside, no neurodivergent subplot, no historical revision. The movie simply watches its characters trade intimacy for cash and then drives off, leaving the audience to sit with the wreckage. As a cultural artifact, it registers as a curiosity from a different era of independent cinema, one that trusted provocation over instruction. The ledger here is empty, and the emptiness is the point. Not every film is trying to teach us something, and this one is barely trying to do anything at all beyond making us squirm. That, at least, it accomplishes with a certain efficiency. We grade it accordingly: a clean sheet, a shrug, and a long drive home.