by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a Lifetime movie called Sometimes the Good Kill, a 2017 production from Incendo Media (reflecting
the “incendiary” character of their name, their logo shows the “o” at the end
bursting into flame) that’s a murder mystery set in a convent. When the Mother
Superior of the order is found dead outside the grounds, hit by a wooden beam
and a rock that were detritus from a reconstruction project on the convent’s
building, the convent somehow has the clout to keep the police from
investigating and instead the nuns take charge of the investigation themselves.
The order has the right to elect its own Mother Superior and the two leading
candidates are relatively young and easygoing Joy (Allison Hossack) and the
tougher, more traditional Cypriana (Nora McLellan), though the most traditional nun in the place, Sister Nora (Krista
Bridges), doesn’t like either of the candidates and wish someone more hard-line
would run — particularly someone who would restore the dress code that would
require the nuns to go about in full habits all the time instead of being able
to doff the hat while on convent grounds and to dress in normal clothes when
they’re doing their charitable work outside, which consists mostly of feeding
and reaching out to homeless people. At least two other people end up
mysteriously dead, including groundskeeper Conor (Marshall Williams), the only
male on the premises and one who’s attractive enough it seems likely he might
tempt one of the sisters to break their vows and have sex with him. Sister
Talia (Susie Abromeit, a quite capable actress and also a good-looking and
charismatic woman I’d like to see again in something in which she isn’t playing a nun) takes it upon herself to investigate
the killings and find out “whodunit.”
The problem with Sometimes the
Good Kill is it’s simply not a very
interesting story — as I’ve joked in the past about other, similarly lame
mysteries, it’s less a whodunit than a whocareswhodunit — and except for the
ones who are given some
characteristic by writer Ian Carpenter that sets them apart from the rest (like
Sister Mai — pronounced “My” — who’s played by Lisa Truong and who’s convinced
the other nuns are prejudiced against her because she’s Asian), the nuns tend
to blend together into a mass of official religiosity. About the only
interesting thing writer Carpenter has to tell us about Sister Talia is that
before she entered the convent she was in the military (this being Lifetime
it’s unclear just where this is
taking place — no doubt it was filmed in Canada, especially with “Montreal
Casting” being credited as one of the production companies on imdb.com, but
it’s not certain whether Canada is “playing” itself this time or filling in for
the U.S. as usual in Lifetime films) and she cultivated certain skills,
including being able to kill people, that come in handy when she finally solves
the murder and finds at least three of the sisters are involved. Oona (Yulia
Petrauskas) actually committed at least one of the crimes, but one of the other
sisters got her to do it by speaking to her and passing herself off as a voice
inside Oona’s head — and among the guilty sisters are a raven-haired woman who
had studied to be a doctor and an
older sister who had broken her own vows, got pregnant and raised the resulting
daughter to be a nun in the order herself. There’s also a red herring in the
form of Father Joseph Kinsella (Stuart Hughes), who wanted to sell the convent
to a developer so it could be turned into condos and wanted to move the order
downtown where he could keep an eye on these errant nuns.
One thing Sometimes
the Good Kill does right is dramatize how
the Roman Catholic Church, especially the parts of it depicted here, really does regard itself as a law of its own; as the real-life
priests who covered up for child molesters in the ranks did when they worked
overtime to keep secular law enforcement from finding out what was going on,
the priest and nuns in this movie somehow manage to conceal three murders from
the local cops (we never even see
any of the local cops!) and take it upon themselves to solve the crime and mete
out whatever punishment is needed. Aside from that, though, Sometimes
the Good Kill is a bore, wasting some good
Gothic effects from director Philippe Gagnon on a story that not only makes
very little sense but doesn’t do much to keep our attention because, aside from
Talia and Mai, the characters simply aren’t that interesting. James Agee said
in his review of Black Narcissus
— a much more highly regarded movie but also about the kinky thrill of seeing a
bunch of nuns deal with both human and (potentially) supernatural skullduggery
in an old and presumably haunted convent — “Barring perhaps one in any hundred
who willingly practice it, I think celibacy is of itself faintly obscene; so I
admire still less the dramatic exploitation of celibacy as an opportunity for
titillation in the best of taste.” And if that’s true of Black
Narcissus — a film that was at least trying for artistic excellence (and which has an undeserved
reputation as a masterpiece because in the joint résumé of producers-directors
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger it happened to fall between two films
that are masterpieces, A
Matter of Life and Death and The
Red Shoes) — it’s even more true about a schlocky Lifetime opus whose denouement turns
on a nun getting pregnant two decades earlier and getting her daughter into the
same order!
