by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyight © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The next movie Lifetime showed last night, Best Friend’s
Betrayal, was the epitome of Lifetime’s
standard fare. It takes place in a small town called Kirkwood Falls (one of
Lifetime’s typical Everywhere, U.S.A. communities that can be “played” on
screen by Everywhere, Canada) where local coffeehouse owner Katie Sanders
(Vanessa Walsh) and event planner Jess Walker (Mary Grill) are best friends.
They first met in seventh grade, where they latched on to each other after the
“cool kids” snubbed them both in the school cafeteria. (I suffered so much in
seventh grade, mostly from bullies, it’s probably just as well my junior high
school — I hate that more recent
neologism “middle school” — didn’t have a cafeteria.) The scene then cuts to
the present day with raven-haired Katie and blonde Jess becoming “besties” (Besties was the working title for the film and I think it
would have worked better because it would have captured the careful ambiguity
of Rebeca Hughes’ story and Aidan Scott’s script) — the original implication is
they’ve stayed in touch ever since seventh grade and we only learn quite later that
they fell apart and then re-bonded since both were getting over marital
breakups, Katie with Kevin Lewis (Patrick Rinehart) after she caught him
cheating on her with a 19-year-old redhead in his office, and Jess with Marco
(Matt Hamilton), who beat her and after their divorce (which still isn’t final
when the movie begins) descended into alcoholism and then broke into Jess’s
home and demanded she come back to him then and there — only Katie warded him
off with a convenient can of pepper spray she was carrying with her. The
relationship between Katie and Jess starts to unravel when incredibly
successful and devilishly handsome thriller writer Nick Moore (Jaime M.
Callica) comes back to Kirkwood Falls to do a book signing for his latest
novel, and Jess works with him as his event planner and the two fall into at
least mutual lust.
We’re told that Nick was born and raised in Kirkwood Falls —
a mystery because, despite his Latino-sounding name, Jaime M. Callica is
actually African-American and there’s no evidence of any other Black people in Kirkwood Falls (and the former
girlfriend of his we learn about during the story is also white). But when his
first novel was a success he moved to New York City and wrote his second, which
sold but got criticized by reviewers who said the characters weren’t as well
rounded — so he cancels the rest of his book tour and decides to re-settle in
Kirkwood Falls and write his third book there. The fact that he has a major
case of the hots for Jess helps him make that decision, too. Only nasty things
started happening — first Jess’s ex-husband Marco takes a drunken fall down the
stairs of the motel where he’s been staying since Jess threw him out, and while
the police, in the person of Detective Perkins (unidentified on the imdb.com
cast list but played by a portly white guy on the cusp between middle age and
senior citizenhood), rule his death an accident we know better because we saw the killing go down — or
at least heard him say, “What are you doing here?,” to a hooded figure at the top of his stairs just before
he fell. Then there’s a scene in which Katie is apparently struck by a car as
she’s leaving a parking garage (I’ve seen enough Lifetime movies to know how
much mayhem goes on in parking garages in them!), and she ends up in the
hospital with a few broken bones and tells Jess she saw Nick driving the car
that ran her down. Between that and the plots of Nick’s novels, which are about
sexually motivated serial killers written in the first-person voice of the
killers themselves, Jess becomes convinced that Nick is a psycho interested in
seducing, raping and killing her in a way similar to that of the people he
writes about. Nick reinforces that impression when he makes a mysterious phone
call to an unseen party asking for “work” on Katie — he’s just calling a
private investigator to research her background (and most of what he comes up
with is pictures and report cards from her seventh-grade year) but writers
Hughes and Scott and director Danny J. Boyle (no, not that Danny Boyle!) make it sound like he’s hiring a hit
man to knock Katie off to get her out of the way so he can have his wicked way
with Jess.
Meanwhile, Jess gets talked by her assistant Anna (Britt McKillip)
to come out with her for a night at a trendy yuppie bar with her 20-something
friends, where Jess gets drunk on shots and Anna dares her to do something
she’d ordinarily never do — so the two women give each other a deep-mouthed
kiss and an intense embrace that makes them look like Lesbian lovers. We see
Nick stalking them outside in his car and looking disgusted at his would-be
girlfriend making out with another woman, and we also see Katie, whom Jess had
invited to join them and who showed up outside the bar but never went in
because she too was disgusted at seeing Jess lip-locked with another woman —
though Charles was starting to wonder if the payoff would be that Katie had her
own Lesbian attraction to Jess and was thinking, “If you’re going to go homo,
do it with me!” About two-thirds
of the way through the movie there’s a typical Lifetime switcheroo (though it
was telegraphed by the title and also the imdb.com page’s synopsis — for a page
whose editors are so obsessed with “spoilers” it’s amusing they posted one
themselves): Katie turns out to be a relentlessly possessive clinger who’s been
latching onto people and driving them away since seventh grade, when she
latched onto Kevin Lewis (ya remember Kevin Lewis?) and got jealous when he started dating a girl
named Michelle again. Katie’s cover-up unravels when she tells Jess that the
woman she caught Kevin cheating with was a blonde — earlier she’d said she was
a redhead — and eventually Jess traces and visits Kevin and learns that he and
Katie were never married and the
blonde in question, Michelle, is the only woman he’s ever been interested in
and is his first and only wife. Katie just made up the story about her and
Kevin being married and breaking up so she’d have a way to re-bond with Jess,
who really was going through a
breakup with an awful man.
The movie ends with the predictable confrontation
between Jess and Katie, in which Katie — who pushed Jess’s ex Marco down the
stairs and later strangled Anna (ya remember Anna?) to death out of possessive jealousy — goes after
Jess with a kitchen knife (why do
people in Lifetime movies leave their kitchen knives in knife blocks on their
counter when, if they ever saw
Lifetime movies, they’d know that would just make it easier for the psycho
killers to assault and potentially kill them in the last reel? It’s like
Charlie Chan always leaving his windows open so people can aim rifles through
them and pick off his house guests), only Nick shows up in the nick (pardon the
pun) of time and grabs the can of pepper spray Katie gave Jess earlier on and
incapacitates her until the police can come and arrest her. (Fortunately, the
movie ends with Nick and Jess paired up and Nick using Jess’s experience as raw
material for his third novel; it does not include one of those annoying tag scenes Lifetime has been giving us
lately showing Katie in jail either obsessively clipping photos of Jess or
forming another murderous “bestie” crush on one of her fellow inmates.) Best
Friend’s Betrayal is an O.K. Lifetime
movie, powered less by anything unusual about the plot (though it’s nice that
the drop-dead gorgeous male lead does not turn out to be the villain, and even nicer in a how-far-we’ve-come
sense that he’s Black and the writers and directors do not make that a Big Issue in the plot) than some nice
acting, especially by Vanessa Walsh as the actual villain — though it’s so well
established that her coffeehouse is the only source for a decent cup of java in
the whole town one wonders, once she’s in custody at the end, where Kirkwood
Fallers will be able to go for a good cup of coffee!
