by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Lifetime’s 6 p.m. fare last night was a surprisingly good
riff on some of their usual themes, Mommy Group Murder — yes, the title looks as if some people in a
writers’ room asked each other, “What’s the most ridiculous title a Lifetime
movie could have?,” the film actually turned out to be pretty good, artfully
done and putting a nice “spin” on some old, familiar Lifetime clichés. The film
begins with a woman being rushed to a hospital to give birth: she is Natalie
Westport (Lifetime regular Leah Pipes) and her husband Ryan (Ryan Carnes) is
with her. The film then offers one of Lifetime’s familiar time jumps — though
this time it’s only five months instead of years or even decades — and when we
meet the Westports again they’re the proud parents of baby daughter Hannah (in
case we didn’t get her name, they’ve already outfitted her with her own room in
their house with big letters spelling out H-A-N-N-A-H on the wall), only mom is
suffering from the Mother of All Post-Partum Depressions and is having nightmares.
In one of the most chilling scenes in writer-director Nick Everhart’s film,
she’s taking a bath, getting a rare respite from taking care of her baby, when
all of a sudden she has a nightmare hallucination that the baby is in the
bathtub with her and it’s drowning. Things reach a head when Natalie goes
jogging in the local park, pushing Hannah in her stroller (Charles thought the
stroller was so large it reminded him of a tank, but I’ve seen real-life moms
on the street pushing considerably larger ones), when a couple of young punks
race up beside her while she’s drinking from a portable water bottle and steal
her cell phone. Natalie lets go of Hannah’s stroller to give chase to the phone
thieves, and Hannah’s stroller rolls off for a potentially dire fate from which
she’s saved only by the timely intervention of Grace Gable (Helena Mattsson), a
woman about Natalie’s age, who blocks the stroller with her own body and
enables Natalie to recover her baby unharmed. Grace says she’s a member of a
new mothers’ support group whose members help each other through the various
traumas associated with raising babies and who also do a lot of socializing
together, including various lunches.
The most important members of the group —
at least the ones Everhart fleshes out most as characters — are Maria (Kate
Mansi), an emergency room doctor (she’s not fully licensed yet but she’s in the
last year of her residency) who’s convinced her husband Tony (Joshua Leary) is
cheating on her but doesn’t know where or with whom; and Roz (Nichole Galicia),
the obligatory African-American voice of reason (who looks through most of the
film like Nick Everhart is setting her up to be the obligatory Black person who
figures out the white villainess’s scheme but gets killed for her pains), whose
husband takes a lot of long “business trips,” leading Roz to fear that he’s
cheating on her. Midway through
the movie Natalie gets a phone message from someone she doesn’t know, Savannah
Bowen, warning her that Grace isn’t who or what she claims to be and that her
real name is “Rachel Temple.” (I liked Everhart naming both of Grace’s identities after major movie stars of the
1930’s, Clark Gable and Shirley Temple.) As any hardened Lifetime movie watcher
could have figured out almost as soon as she appeared, Grace turns out to be
the villainess of the piece. Grace has shown Natalie her own baby boy, Thomas,
and tells her that she’s a single mom since Thomas’s dad divorced her before
the kid was born, but Bowen’s text message arouses Natalie’s suspicions and she
starts to investigate Grace. She finds out that there’s no record of Grace
being married or giving birth, and while she lives in a nice house in the nice
suburban neighborhood where all this is taking place, there’s no evidence of
her having assumed legal title to it and, indeed, no indication in official
records of where her income is coming from. It turns out that Grace is the
woman Maria’s husband Tony is cheating on her with —Tony keeps trying to break
it off and Grace keeps threatening to kill herself if he does so, though one
night Grace loses it and stabs Tony with the knife she originally threatened to
use on herself. Then she washes the crime scene and gets blood off the knife
but still leaves a blood spot on her face until she notices it and takes it off
with her own spit (a scene repeated in the next movie Lifetime showed, the
“premiere” of A Daughter’s Deception).
At one point Natalie goes to visit Grace’s home, needs to use the bathroom, and
mistakenly thinks the door to Grace’s basement is the restroom and asks Grace
why it’s locked. That’s a deposit
in the old cliché bank Everhart is sure to redeem to give himself an ending! In
the end it turns out that Grace is the product of 30 foster homes and thus got
a fixation on the concept of “family” even though she was too crazy to hold on
to a man long enough to have one au naturel (a bit of Christine Conradtian backstory Everhart
blessedly gave her so she’s not just
the bad girl and we have at least a bit of understanding of who she is and why she’s doing what she’s doing,
and the story is also Conradtian in that the working title for the film was The
Perfect One). Instead she staged some sort
of home invasion at the home of Drew (Ryan McIntire) and Lydia (April
Billingsley) Jackson, not only the real owners of the house Grace is living in
but the real parents of “her” baby, whom they named Bobby instead of Thomas.
Grace knocked off Drew but kept Lydia alive as a sort of brood cow to provide
mother’s milk for Thomas, and the reason the basement is kept locked is that’s
where Grace is keeping Lydia and literally milking her. Natalie and her Black
friend Roz (ya remember her Black friend Roz?) figure all this out and Roz tries to get Natalie
to call the police, but Natalie goes to confront Grace and ends up locked in
that basement inside a freezer (which fortunately at least is not turned on).
Roz gets knocked out by the villainous Grace and is sprawled out on her
living-room floor, but Lydia — who had some help from Natalie before Grace
caught both of them — frees herself of the bondage Grace has held her in.
Natalie figures out how to break out of the freezer and does so, and though
Grace has a gun, Natalie gets it away from her briefly, it ends up on the
floor, and just as it looks like Grace is going to strangle Natalie to death
Lydia (ya remember Lydia?) grabs
the gun and shoots her.
It ends with the police arriving — with Marie in tow
giving Natalie emergency care from the gunshot wound Grace inflicted on her
before she lost control of the gun; Natalie has to break the news to Marie that
her husband Tony is dead at the hands of his paramour, and there’s a sad coda
to the effect that with her
husband dead Lydia has to move herself and Bobby out of that ritzy neighborhood
but she’ll get enough money from the sale of the house to start elsewhere. Then
there’s a flash-forward of a year, and Natalie has not only recovered from
post-partum depression but has resumed the career of high-school history
teacher she put on hold because she wanted a year off to bond with her baby. Mommy
Group Murder, despite the risible title,
scores higher than most Lifetime movies though Everhart’s skillful direction —
the last two acts in particular come off almost like a horror film — along with
his well-constructed script and some nice performances he gets out of his cast,
Helena Mattsson as the coolly controlled psycho in particular. It also helps
that he and casting director Anthony Del Negro found an actor considerably
hotter than the tall, sandy-haired “type” Lifetime likes for its clueless
husbands to play Natalie’s other half, Ryan (apparently Ryan Carnes has a
reputation of his own from being in the current cast of the endlessly running
soap opera General Hospital).
Everhart and hair department head James Frederick should have done something
more definitive with Leah Pipes’ hair, though; sometimes she looks
brown-haired, sometimes she looks blonde (so much so that in a few two-shots
with her and the consistently blonde Mattsson it’s not easy to tell them
apart), sometimes she wears it straight, sometimes in a pony tail and sometimes
in braids.
