by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched a Lifetime movie which they billed as a
“premiere” even though the copyright date on imdb.com is 2018: Hidden Family
Secrets, shot under the working title (and
listed on imdb.com as) My Daughter’s Missing. For once an altered title for a Lifetime movie was
actually an improvement, since the drama does indeed focus on the “hidden
family secrets” of the Taylors. When the film begins the Taylors are dad Scott
(Cuyle Carvin), mom Melanie (Diora Baird, top-billed) and their 17-year-old
daughter Gabby (Abbie Gayle). We see them motorboating on a lake while they’re
using their vacation cabin (gee, not another Lifetime movie in which the protagonists have a
vacation cabin!), with mom driving, Gabby in the passenger seat and dad
standing up in the rear of the boat. Only Gabby pleads with her mom to be
allowed to drive the boat, and once mom lets her Gabby accidentally pushes the
throttle all the way to full, and the force of the acceleration knocks dad
overboard. We see a bloodstain on the side of the boat, indicating that in the
fall Scott’s head hit the side of the boat and caused an injury that presumably
knocked him unconscious and led to his death by drowning — at least that’s as
best as I could put together what supposedly happened from the hints in Mark
Sanderson’s script. There are a lot
of directions in which he could have taken this — at first I was thinking that
Sanderson was heading for the same cliché stash Michael Feifer probed in the
similarly titled His Secret Family
— dad was leading a double life and faked his own death so he could dump one of his wives and live openly with
the other — but no-o-o-o-o, the
shore patrol at the lake drag up a corpse and, though we only see it wrapped in
black, we’re obviously supposed to believe dad’s body has been recovered and
definitively identified. We then get a typical Lifetime chyron after the
opening credits, “Six Months Later,” and six months later her father’s death
has sent Gabby into the Mother of All Blue Funks, plunging her grade point
average, making her skip classes, causing her to dump her boyfriend Jason
Keating (Andrew Matthew Welsh, a cute twink if you like that sort of thing) and
draw frowning-face emojis all over everything. Meanwhile, mom is hosting her
brother Steve (the quite hunky Jordan James Smith) as a houseguest and, though
their relationship blessedly stops short of Die Walküre territory, in all other respects he’s become a sort
of substitute husband, nursing his sister through her own grief as well as her
anxiety over Gabby’s inability to let go of hers.
Gabby is getting mysterious
text messages from someone identified only as “H.T.,” and so my next wrong
guess as to which set of Lifetime clichés Sanderson would use to power his
story was that “H.T.” was an older man living remotely in the woods who wanted
to molest Gabby and was exploiting her ongoing grief to lure her. Instead
“H.T.” turns out to be Helen Taylor, mother of the late Scott Taylor, whom
Melanie read out of their lives when she married Scott because she feared Helen
was mentally ill and would pose a threat to them. Helen meets Gabby at the
lakeside cabin (actually she meets her in town and drives her up there) and
then lures her to her home, which is the one in which Scott grew up (his dad
died when Scott was 12 and Helen raised him as a single parent thereafter) and
she’s kept his old bedroom as a virtual shrine to him. There’s at least a hint
that Helen, like the old women in Val Lewton’s vest-pocket masterpiece The
Curse of the Cat People, is going to give
Gabby the love and support her own mom isn’t — we’ve seen mom directly (and
counterproductively) confronting Gabby about her behavior — but no-o-o-o-o-o, it would be too much to hope that a Lifetime writer
and director (Sam Irvin) would have gone for the subtlety of Lewton and his
team. Instead we quickly find out that Helen Taylor is a psycho, first when she “accidentally” drops
Gabby’s cell phone in the lake so Gabby can’t call home and tell mom where she
is, then claims her own cell phone’s battery has run out, and then pulls the wires on her landline’s headset so it doesn’t work either. We’re even more convinced that
grandma is crazy when we see a shot of her medicine cabinet and it’s filled
with a lineup of about six or seven neatly arranged (and identically sized)
prescription bottles, presumably containing psychotropics, and it’s clinched
when Helen offers Gabby lunch but spikes both the mayonnaise on her sandwich
and her iced tea with some sort of white fluid that contains a knockout drug.
(Yet one more reason to “hold the mayo”!) The rest of the movie is typical Lifetime
stuff, as mom and Steve mount an increasingly frantic search for Gabby’s
whereabouts, finally realize she’s with her crazy grandmother and track them
down first to the cabin and then to grandma’s house (they just barely miss them
both times!), and finally to mom’s own home, where grandma plans to drug Gabby
and plunge her in the bathtub so mom, too, will know what it’s like to lose a
child by drowning.
Hidden Family Secrets might have been an even stronger movie if Sanderson had made Steve Scott’s brother instead of Melanie’s — then he could have
realized the sexual tension implicit in the movie we have (I imagine director
Irwin tried to remind Jordan
James Smith and Diora Baird that they were supposed to be playing brother and
sister and therefore shouldn’t look like they were drooling over each other,
but finally gave up) and given Melanie powerful guilt feelings over being
attracted to her former brother-in-law — but it’s implicit in the plot we have
that the late Scott be Helen’s only child so we believe his death would propel
her from controllable mental illness to full-fledged psychopathology. Irwin’s
quiet direction, avoiding the over-the-top excesses Sanderson’s script could
have lent themselves to and probably would have in the hands of some other Lifetime director, and the subtle,
enigmatic performance of Blanche Baker as Helen, a far cry from the
eye-rolling, nostril-flaring Bette Davis reduz performances we’ve seen in other women playing
Lifetime psychos, raise this somewhat above the Lifetime norm, but it’s still
yet another detour into melodrama in a story that could have been more powerful
if it had been just about a
daughter grieving over the dead father she feels responsible for killing, and
an estranged relative whose misguided but sincere attempts to support her only
traumatize her further.
