Add Decider on Google Where to Stream: Not A Stranger Powered by Reelgood More On: thrillers ‘The Seemingly Perfect Family’ True Story: The Real Murder of Sophie Lionnet Might Have Inspired the Lifetime Movie Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Stolen Heartbeats’ On Netflix, A Micro-Thriller About A Hot Male Nurse Who Communicates With The Spirit Of A Woman In A Coma Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Perfect Lie’ On Netflix, A Thriller Where A Mysterious Death Dredges Up Secrets Among A Group Of Rich Friends Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Fauda’ Season 5 On Netflix, Where Doron Gets Deeply Involved In A Post-October 7 Revenge Plot In Netflix‘s new Turkish thriller Not A Stranger, an overwhelmed new mom hires a nanny that she thinks is perfect, but it turns out that she has a past with other members of the mom’s family, and not the purest of motives.
Opening Shot: We see a rubber duckie in a pool, then a look at a mother’s face from her baby daughter’s perspective.
The Gist: Funda (Elçin Sangu) has been struggling emotionally since the birth of her now one-year-old daughter. A well-regarded artist, she hasn’t painted any new works since her pregnancy. She and her husband İlker (Ozan Dolunay) haven’t had sex in months. And she’s so overprotective of her daughter that she fires nannies if her daughter cries a little bit in their presence.
But she wants to go back to her art, to the point where she’s set up a gallery showing in two months, where she’s promised the organizer that she’ll feature new work. It seems that the only person she’s encountered that is good with her daughter is Nazlı (Melis Sezen), the baby’s swim instructor. So when Nazlı tells Funda she’s quitting her job and moving away due to a bad roommate situation, Funda almost on the spot hires Nazlı as the new nanny.
She’s seemingly perfect for the job, but things start going awry when İlker comes back from a business trip and meets Nazlı for the first time, recognizing her instantly as someone with whom he once had a one-night stand.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Written by Tuğba Doğan, Not A Stranger reminds us of other “suspicious nanny” thrillers like Secrets We Keep and Servant.
Our Take: Most of the story of Not A Stranger is told from a time period where Funda is talking to someone from either prison or a psychiatric hospital, which shows how much psychological torture she’s going to go through with Nazlı. While it seems like the show is a pretty standard case of “be careful of whom you let into your life,” it’s still an interesting examination in how overwhelmed first-time mothers can get, even those who have the resources Funda has.
Funda put her trust in Nazlı, and it’s pretty apparent that Nazlı, as perfect as she seems, schemed her way into Funda and İlker’s life. Funda is already weighing Nazlı’s skills with her daughter against her previous relationship with İlker, so we’re pretty sure she’ll be spending the entire series trying to figure out what Nazli’s deal is while appreciating that she somehow gets the baby to sleep.
There is certainly room for some twists and turns in this story, and the series will likely hinge on how things are resolved. But we were definitely intrigued by how determined Funda is to making the arrangement work so she can get back to her art and former self.
Performance Worth Watching: While Melis Sezen has to do some creepy heavy lifting as Nazlı, we’re more fascinated with the range of emotions that Elçin Sangu has to go through as Funda.
Sex And Skin: There’s a few sex scenes as Funda tries to rev up her and İlker’s sex life, but not much nudity.
Parting Shot: “Whatever happened, happened because of me,” Funda says from the hospital and/or prison. “You get hubristic, you lose.”
Our Call: STREAM IT. The first episode of Not A Stranger does a solid job establishing the story and just how desperate Funda is to get pieces of her pre-parenting life back, which will lead her to some interesting decisions.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
