by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was a Lifetime
movie called The House Sitter — note that it’s three words instead of two, though it’s an oft-used
title: imdb.com lists a Housesitter (no article) from 2007 (“Waitress Elise’s dream to become a painter
isn't going anywhere, unlike her ex Gerry's, so she eagerly accepts to
house-sit a month the country estate eccentric gentleman Frank inherited), a The
Housesitter from 2012 (“For more than
a century an elite secret society from a prestigious New England university has
engaged in a macabre rite of passage. Now, a rival they did not know they had
has sent a killer”) and another The House Sitter from 2015 (“A house sitter considers the
possibility he may not be alone; after he starts hearing strange noises during
the night”). The fact that this title has been used so often may explain why this one was originally filmed under the title Welcome
Home — though it’s cut so
closely to the Christine Conradt format, albeit written and directed by others
(Marcy Holland is the writer and Jim Issa — any relation to Darrell? — is the
director), they might as well have called it The Perfect Housesitter. It’s basically the same-old, same-old Lifetime
formula that’s got pretty threadbare after they’ve been making these movies for
over a decade. It begins with a confusing prologue in which a young woman and
her boyfriend come to the home of her parents, from whom she’s been estranged
for years, and finds that they’re seated at the dining table with their throats
slit. Through most of the film I was unclear as to whether that was going to be the denouement we should expect from the main story or whether
that was a crime committed by the title character similar to what she was
planning to do to the other central characters (it turned out to be the
latter).
The main characters are the Lawrences: father Kyle (Sean O’Brien),
mother Sara (Kate Ashfield) — who speaks with an impeccable upper-class British
accent throughout; presumably Kyle, whose own vocal tones are nasal American
Midwest, met and married a British woman lo those many years ago — and their
two daughters. One of them, Lauren, the older, died before the main action
begins — she fell through the ice at a frozen lake where the Lawrences were
vacationing — and the other, younger daughter Amy (Shelby Young) is alive but
all too conscious that her parents considered her second-best when her sister
was alive and still do even though she’s now the only one they’ve got. Amy is
dating a cute guy named Travis (Guyon Brandt) but draws back from having sex
with him. The titular house sitter is Rebecca (Ashley Dulaney, who turns in a nice
psycho performance, though these nice psycho performances are starting to
impress me less and less simply because as a regular Lifetime watcher I’ve seen
too damned many of them — indeed, as engagingly twitchy as Dulaney is, I think
Young as Amy out-acts her!), who agreed to look after the Lawrences’ home while
the three of them went on some sort of business trip that ended early. Rebecca
pleads with the Lawrence parents that she has no place to stay since the
residents of the next house she’s supposed to house-sit are still there and
aren’t planning to leave for a few more days. No problem, says Mrs. Lawrence
(Mr. Lawrence is a bit more dubious, as usual in these productions); Rebecca
can stay in their guest room — though Rebecca “accidentally” takes a wrong turn
and ends up in the dead sister Lauren’s old room, which the Lawrences have kept
unchanged as a sort of shrine to her. Amy goes ballistic when she sees Rebecca
pawing through her sister’s belongings, but Rebecca apologizes in her best
smarmy, mock-sincere manner.
Eventually it turns out that Rebecca is on a
campaign not only to take the place of the dead Lauren in the Lawrence family
but to push Amy out of the way — Sara is totally taken by her and Kyle is
snowed, but Amy realizes, as she puts it, that someone as relentlessly perky as
Rebecca is not to be trusted. To turn Amy’s parents against her, Rebecca drugs
her water and forces her to pass out in bed, then tells them Amy has been
drinking. Next Rebecca seduces Amy’s boyfriend Travis (ya remember Amy’s
boyfriend Travis?) and, while they’re in
the sex act, shoots them with Amy’s smartphone (luckily for Rebecca’s scheme,
Amy went out without it), carefully framing the image so the red bra of Amy’s
Rebecca is wearing is visible but her face isn’t, then reports to her parents
that she’s found a salacious video on Amy’s phone. Eventually it all works up
to the scene anticipated by the “teaser” opening in which Rebecca clubs Amy
twice to make sure she doesn’t interfere, then offers to serve Kyle and Sara a
dinner — only she ties them to their dining chairs and stabs Kyle so he won’t
resist, and the Lawrences would be on their way to the same fate as the mystery
couple in the opening scene if it weren’t for Amy, who comes to and distracts
Rebecca long enough to get the gun she’s been holding on the Lawrences. It
doesn’t fire, but Sara is able to undo her bonds in the confusion and she is the one who gets to grab a blunt object and
take Rebecca out with it — though it’s unclear whether she kills Rebecca or
just incapacitates her long enough for the police to come and take her into
custody. The House Sitter is a pretty ordinary example of the Lifetime formula, a bit below par
because writer Holland and director Issa tread on the thin edge of risibility through
most of the film and go over it a few times — though they do create some chilling moments, including the scene
towards the end in which Rebecca is holding a gun on Amy and telling her she no
longer belongs in the family, and Amy is somehow able to hold on to her
composure in spite of this stranger “hooking” all her worst fears about her
parents looking down on her and wishing it had been she who had died instead of her sister.