by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie, a not-bad
“problem drama” called No One Would Tell
about a high-school junior, Sarah Collins (Matryea Scarrwener, the sort of name
that in old Hollywood got changed), whose mom Laura has raised her as a single
parent — though I don’t recall if writer Caitlin D. Fryers ever provided an
explanation for how she became a
single parent, whether she divorced Laura’s dad or he died — and since the end
of her relationship with Sarah’s father ended (however that was) has been in
and out of a series of dysfunctional relationships of her own. Sarah falls head
over heels in love with attractive, charismatic, popular senior Rob Tennison
(Callan Potter) and the two start to date, only shortly thereafter he reveals
his dark side, getting angry with her over something trivial and giving her the
same sort of back-handed slap to the face, knocking her over, that Patrick
Bergin gave Julia Roberts in the grandmother of all modern-day domestic-abuse
movies, Sleeping with the Enemy.
Then, like all movie batterers (and all too many of the real-life ones as
well!), he immediately proclaims that he’s sorry, he’s really in love with her
and he’ll never hit her again or even think of doing so. Of course, that’s so much B.S.; the
next altercation between them occurs at a school dance when Rob accuses Sarah
of flirting with another guy, and this time it’s witnessed by other students,
notably Sarah’s friend Nikki Farrow (Chanelle Peloso), who comes over to the
Collins home so often she’s practically a third member of the family. It’s also
witnessed by Gus (Ricky He), an Asian-American student who’s on the school’s
wrestling team with Rob and Zack Carter (Trezzo Mahoro), a Black kid who’s a
good friend of Rob’s.
Sarah breaks it off with Rob and threatens to report him
— at one point she’s ready to go with Nikki to tell the coach of the school
wrestling team about Rob’s abusive ways, but then gets cold feet after she gets
a stare from Rob’s new blonde bimbo girlfriend and realizes that no one at the
school would believe the popular Rob is an abuser and she’d be the one who’d get dumped on. It all ends when Rob
tricks Sarah into taking one last car ride with him, telling her he’ll take her
home, but instead he takes her to a deserted cabin in the mountains (why do so
many Lifetime movies these days end at deserted cabins in the mountains?) and
Zack, who was there supposedly chaperoning but really had drunk himself into a
stupor over his own romantic breakup, was only sporadically conscious and aware
of what was going on. Just why
Rob took Sarah there and was hoping to accomplish isn’t clear, but he pleads
for Sarah to return to him, she says no, and he sneaks up behind her and
strangles her with his forearm. The way director Gail Harvey (yet another
promising Lifetime director who deserves a shot at better scripts) stages it,
we’re obviously supposed to get the idea that Rob didn’t mean to kill her, but
he did, and he wraps Sarah’s body in a blue tarp and dumps it in the lake,
where police divers find it after the other people in the story piece together
what happened and Zack remembers enough of what went on to lead Sarah’s mom,
Nikki and the cops to the lakeshore cabin. The film is framed by interrogations
of the various survivors about what happened — Sarah is already dead at the
start of the film (we don’t know that for sure but we suspect since we don’t
see her as one of the people being questioned) — in what I suspect may be a
borrowing of the gimmick from Big Little Lies, which is also told in flashbacks from police
interrogations, where from the start of the book we know something dire happened but it’s only until the end that we
realize what (and since Big Little Lies writer Liane Moriarty made the abuser, not his victim, the one who died
her story is a lot more
satisfying).
The ending takes place in a courtroom where Rob is being tried for
Sarah’s murder — since he’s a juvenile it’s a relatively informal proceeding
and there’s only a judge, not a jury — and the judge is Mira Sorvino in a guest
turn, first announcing that she’s finding Rob guilty and then delivering a
lecture not only to the characters but to the audience as well. She mentions
that during the period from 2001 to 2012 twice as many women (nearly 12,000)
were killed by their relationship partners as died in the U.S.’s wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, and the film ends with a title giving contact numbers for two
organizations against domestic violence to which people can report incidents of
it involving themselves or others. This is a laudable goal but the film itself
is all too didactic, decently acted — Callan Potter is thoroughly believable as
Rob, an otherwise decent guy with a mean streak and an ability to keep his sang-froid even when he’s doing despicable things like beating
his girlfriend and ultimately killing her. And Matreya Scarrwener, despite that
impossible name, is equally good as Sarah even though one could wish Fryers’
script gave her more of a clue as to just what keeps her in thrall to the
asshole — the film does suggest
that she’s vulnerable to a destructive relationship because her mom hasn’t
exactly provided her a role model in her own pathetic flings with one man after
another (none of whom do we actually meet) and also that she’s intimidated by
Rob’s BMOC popularity (though the film Speak did a much better job of dramatizing the
no-one-would-believe-you-about-me
dilemma the bad guy puts the good girl in), but Sarah is one of those maddening
Lifetime heroines whom it’s hard to maintain sympathy for because she’s just so
stupid. When she meekly takes Rob’s first slap, forgives him on the spot and
declares her undying love, one can only think, “What’s the matter with you,
girl? Apparently you haven’t been watching enough Lifetime movies!”
