Sunday, March 24, 2019

A Daughter’s Deception (MarVista Entertainment, Ties That Bound, Lifetime, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Mommy Group Murder Lifetime ran a “premiere” of something called A Daughter’s Deception, which was a curious variation on one of their frequent tropes — the long-lost child of a couple turns up and identifies themselves, but are they really the person they say they are? This time the directors are Devon Downs and Kenny Gage, and the writer Adam Rockoff — who previously created the film Devious Nanny — and they cast Kennedy Tucker as the mystery woman who comes to the home of Michael (Rusty Joiner) and Laura (Jade Harlow, top-billed) Parker and claims to be Bree Hogan, long-lost daughter of Laura back when she was still living at home, her last name was Bishop, and she “made a mistake,” had sex with some no-goodnik (we’re never told who he was or how they met, but we can guess), got “with child” and was turned out by her ferociously religious parents, who wouldn’t allow her to have an abortion but worked out a deal to turn her child over to an adoptive family as soon as she was born. We see her in the delivery room and then we cut to a title reading, “Twenty Years Later” — we’re used to sudden time jumps between the prologues and the main parts of Lifetime movies but 20 years is a bit much even for them. Twenty years later the Parkers receive word that Laura’s ferociously judgmental ultra-religious parents have just died in a household accident — their home filled with carbon monoxide and it killed both of them — but two police officers, a white one named Detective Holmes (Jordan James Smith) and his Black partner, whose name I can’t recall and who isn’t listed on imdb.com, show up and say it’s a 50-50 chance whether the fatal event was an accident or an intentional murder. Laura hasn’t seen these people since they turned her out for getting knocked up 20 years earlier and so she’s no more than intellectually upset by their deaths, but she regards the convenient appearance of Bree, the daughter those crazy parents forced her to give up for adoption two decades earlier, as a sort of cosmic compensation. Laura takes to Bree instantly and Bree even wins the affections of Skylar (Brianna Gage), Laura’s and her husband Michael’s natural-born child, not only by being the big sister Skylar always wanted but threatening the school bully, Chloe Lopresti (Katelyn Dunkin), after Chloe chest-punched Skylar in the high-school hallway for allegedly looking at Chloe’s (unseen) boyfriend. But Michael remains suspicious, though not so suspicious that he says no when Laura decides to throw a backyard party for the neighbors to celebrate her long-lost daughter’s return to the fold.

Michael runs a computer company and his star programmer is the young, very hot twink Gareth Drury (Max Gray Wilbur), who does a Web search and realizes “Bree” is not who he seems, but he doesn’t last very long because at the party he confronts Bree and she says, “You’ve found out a lot about me. Too bad you’ll never live to tell anybody.” Then she raises a large rock behind him and crushes his head with it. Surprisingly, it takes almost an hour of running time for anyone to notice that Gareth is missing even though Michael and the company’s attorney, Arthur Bishop (David Starzyk), keep trying to reach him on a cell phone which keeps going to voicemail. The Parkers also get a visit from Jon Lopresti (Andrew Pagana), father of the bully who tried to beat up their natural child Skylar and herself got warned off by Bree, and they’re able to tell him off without either them or Skylar getting in any more trouble. In the end it’s Skylar who decides to investigate Bree, and to that end she tracks down Bree’s adoptive parents, the Hogans (Brian McGovern and René Ashton), after Bree has told her that the Hogans actually favored her over their own biological child Jessie, and Jessie got so resentful of her parents for favoring the adopted daughter over her she went crazy and ended up in a mental institution. The moment we hear that we figure that directors Downs and Gage and writer Rockoff are preparing us for a big switcheroo that [spoiler alert!] will explain that “Bree” is really Jessie, who either got released or escaped from the mental institution and decided to avenge herself against her parents by targeting everyone Bree would have cared about, starting with her natural mom and extending to Gareth — whose body she stashed in a shed on the Parkers’ property (wouldn’t it have started to smell?) — as well as Detective Holmes, who seems to have watched too many reruns of Columbo and decided to adopt the modus operandi of Peter Falk’s fabled character in getting murderers to confess by irritating the hell out of them. Alas, Detective Holmes makes the mistake of turning his back on “Bree” and she stabs him to death, then takes his body out to join Gareth’s in the shed. (Wouldn’t it start to smell as the bodies disintegrated in the warm weather?)

It all starts to fall apart when Skylar visits the Hogans and just as she’s getting ready to leave the real Bree (Skyler Wright, who also played a secondary role in the same filmmaking team’s Devious Nanny), shows up. Skylar asks the Hogans who she is and they tell her, and then Skylar realizes the “Bree” they’ve been hosting and letting into their family is really Jessie Hogan, the Hogans’ biological daughter who never got over her parents bending over backwards to make the adopted one feel at home by ignoring their own natural child. Skylar tries to alert her own parents but doesn’t reach them in time, though in the climax the Parkers are rescued by Detective Holmes’ surviving Black partner (once again, in a Lifetime movie, the sensible Black character shows up to save the dumb white ones from their stupidities) and, somewhat to my surprise, though she’s murdered two people Jessie Hogan is merely returned to a mental institution, where in the final scene she’s hanging outside a group that is supposedly doing therapy and muttering to herself, “The next time I pick a family it’s going to be a real one” — which I wondered if writer Rockoff intended as a reversal of his reversal and wanted us to think that the one in the institution was Bree and the one out, free and clear was Jessie. A Daughter’s Deception is actually a pretty good Lifetime movie, though watching it after Mommy Group Murder probably did it no favors — still, the performances by the two young leading women, Kennedy Tucker as the psycho and Brianna Gage as the teenager who figures her out, help make up for the relative dullness of Jade Harlow as the mother, who seems to go through the whole movie with a fixed expression of mild suffering; and Rusty Joiner, who’s genuinely sexy but looks so young we’d be more likely to believe her as Harlow’s son than her husband!