by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The next item on Lifetime’s repertoire after Nightmare
Nurse last night was Suicide Note — the graphic on imdb.com’s page for it lists the
title with an article (The
Suicide Note) but both the actual credits and imdb’s headline are
article-free — about a bunch of college students at an elite private university
(“played” by the campus of Francis Marion University in Florence, South
Carolina, by the way) and the trouble they get into after one of them, Emma
Duncan (Kirsten Ray) either falls, jumps or is pushed off the roof of one of
the campus buildings. Like Nightmare Nurse, Suicide Note was written by Jake Helgren — and this time he got
to direct it as well, and proved to be quite a good suspense director, adept at
building up tension in a whodunit, even though director Helgren was at the
mercy of writer Helgren, who once again turned in a script with barely
believable characters and situations and a preposterous trick ending. The
central character is Emma’s roommate, Molly White (Kirby Bliss Blanton — I was
wondering if she’s any relation to stalwart Lifetime actress Boti Bliss, but I
get the impression from her Wikipedia bio, reprinted on imdb.com, that she
isn’t: “The youngest of four children, she grew up in The Woodlands, Texas, and
started her career doing modeling and commercials in nearby Houston. After
doing some month-long stunts in Los Angeles, she moved there permanently with
her mother. Her first name was given because her parents expected her to be a
boy, her middle name Bliss is her mother's maiden name” — but she scored points
with me in at least one particular: she pronounced the “t” sound in “often”).
Molly previously suffered from clinical depression and attempted suicide
herself — in one scene she shows us the scars, lengthwise down her arms where she cut herself (which I’ve read
is actually more effective than the slice across the wrists; across the wrists and you take so long
to bleed out you’ll probably be found and rescued before you croak) — before
recovering, making it into college, majoring in psychology and just scoring an
especially prized internship in a hospital for the next year that will actually
give her hands-on experience with patients. She’s also got a hot-looking boyfriend,
Brady Faris (Brant Daugherty), who’s an art major at the same college. Her life
seems to be working well, but it starts to go south when her roommate Emma is
angrily confronted by Emma’s boyfriend, Adam Bowen (Stephen Colletti) — the
dorm where Molly, Emma and Molly’s other best friend, Irene Keating (Lexi
Giovagnoli) live is supposed to be all-female and totally off limits to men,
but men seem to have no particular trouble getting in: either they steal those
credit card-like plastic cards with magnetic strips that have taken the place
of old-fashioned keys in buildings like this, or they bribe the maintenance guy
to let them in — who crashes her room and starts chewing her out. Emma tells
Adam that she’s looking forward to a new part of her life that doesn’t involve
him, and the next time Molly and Irene hear of her, she’s fallen off the roof
of one of the campus buildings. The police — headed by Detective Harrison
(Maxwell Highsmith), who for once isn’t an avuncular African-American but an
avuncular white person with a
striking resemblance to Mitt Romney — and the campus authorities are convinced
Emma committed suicide because she left a note behind reading, “I’m sorry.
Forgive me.”
Molly concedes that the handwriting of the note looks like Emma’s but
insists that her knowledge of human character, both as an ace psychology
student and a former attempted suicide herself, convinces her that Emma can’t have killed herself, and she starts a search to find
out what really happened to her. Helgren is a good enough writer to give us a
wide pool of suspects, generated mainly by the sexual goings-on between the
college kids: though Emma was supposed to be dating Adam, she had sex with a
mysterious other guy — and Adam felt entitled to have an affair of his own with
Jasmine (Nthenya Ndunda — the moment I saw those jumbles of letters in the
opening credits I knew the actress and her character would turn out to be
Black, and I was right), a barista at the on-campus coffeehouse, “The Grind.”
Molly suspects that Emma’s alternate boyfriend, and possibly her killer, was
Doug (Kyle Leatherberry), another barista at “The Grind,” but Doug heatedly
denies it. Molly and Irene get together with a stereotypical computer nerd on
campus to hack into Emma’s e-mails and see if they yield a clue as to who
killed her; Molly doesn’t get to read the key clue, but Irene does — and just
then a sinister-looking figure we see only from the waist down crashes her
apartment, strangles her and leaves her corpse under her bed. The climax occurs
on the night of the campus’s end-of-the-year party; Molly absents herself from
it to look up the hacked e-mails and finds one from Emma to Molly’s boyfriend
Brady, saying that she’s breaking up with him and going back to Adam, while
Brady should return to Molly because they’re obviously so right with each
other.
Then Brady appears and tries to strangle Molly, first kissing her as he
puts his hands around her neck (I couldn’t help but think of the line from Othello, “I kissed thee ’ere I killed thee” — I guess at
some point in his life Jake Helgren has read some Shakespeare) and apologizing
that even though he’s in love with her, he’s going to have to knock her off
because he can’t afford having her reveal his secret — and Molly appears to be
falling for it when she notices Irene’s corpse under the other bed in the room.
Molly grabs a baseball bat (what was one doing there?) and clubs Brady with it,
but it only knocks him out temporarily. He chases her as she tries to run away,
and Brady is about to kill Molly when a deus ex machina appears in the form of Professor Majors (Gabrielle
Carteris), who shows up and gets the maintenance guy to let her into the dorm
by showing her faculty ID. She confronts and distracts Brady, but ultimately
Molly kills him with a scalpel Adam, a medical student, had previously put in
her purse to scare her. There’s a tag scene that indicates that Molly is doing
well in her internship — she shows up at “The Grind” wearing red scrubs from
the hospital — and it seems like she and Doug (ya remember Doug?) are headed for a relationship, or at least an
affair. Like Nightmare Nurse, Suicide Note is a pretty good Lifetime movie, neither as great as some of them have
been (can you say Restless Virgins?)
nor as terrible as others (can you say Obsession?), decently directed by Helgren, though if he’s
going to become a major director he needs either to write himself better
scripts or let others do it for him. Suicide Note is a pretty grim movie, and not grim in an
appealingly noir-ish way but just
grim in the sense that it’s one groan-inducing situation after another with
little or no relief. We don’t even get any of the soft-core porn scenes that
have frequently lightened up Lifetime movies and given them a sort of
lubricious entertainment value — and the emergence of nice, hot-looking Brady
as the real killer is something of a surprise, but not really since we’ve been
suspecting all along that that would be at least one of the common Lifetime clichés Helgren would plug in
when his script needed an ending. This is listed as a co-production of Marvista
Entertainment with a company called “G It’s Entertainment,” whose name couldn’t
help but inspire me to joke, “That’s a matter of opinion.”
