by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched last night’s
Lifetime “premiere” movie, Deadly Assistant
— the very title is a “spoiler” that carefully undoes the suspense writers
Blaine Chiappetta (whom I’ve had nice things to say about in the past, though
I’ve misspelled her name, leaving out one of the “p”’s) and Nicole Schubert
carefully created in their script. It was ironic to be watching this right
after a 60 Minutes segment on Game
of Thrones, since Chiappetta and Schubert
carefully depicted the struggle for control of a little yoga studio out in a
California (I think) suburb with all the High Seriousness of the battle for the
Iron Throne in the big eight-year series. The film opens in the middle of a
yoga class being led by Lauren Birch (Kate Gilligan) — we’re told the studio is
being closed pending renovation and a big reopening but Lauren is still leading
classes there (and I suspect the growing interest in yoga among the middle-aged
women who are Lifetime’s target audience is responsible for the increasing
number of Lifetime movies in which yoga classes feature prominently in the
plot) and she’s recorded a number of motivational tapes (or downloads, or
streams, or whatever) which her students use both in her studio and wherever
else they may be. The plot kicks off when Lauren’s sister Amanda (Jeannette
Sousa) arrives in town after a big job in New York just finished and attempts
to re-integrate into Lauren’s family, which consists of her husband Ian (Philip
Boyd), their son Charlie (Keenan Tracey) and the son’s girlfriend Maya (Breanne
Hill), who also works as Lauren’s assistant at the local salon.
Three years
before Amanda visited Lauren and caught Ian kissing another woman; she reported
to her sister that he was having an affair, Lauren didn’t believe it, and the
conflict between the two sisters over the issue never got resolved. Charlie,
Ian’s and Lauren’s son, had a severe alcohol and drug problem, though he got
into a “program” and has been clean and sober for three years. Chiappetta and
Schubert throw us a big curveball in the opening since we expect from the usual
iconography of Lifetime movies — and the title — that Lauren is going to be the
central character and the plot will be about the deadliness of her assistant
Maya, and how she stumbles onto the truth about her and what will happen when
she does. Instead Lauren is killed in the second act when the studio has its
grand reopening, she stammers through her big opening speech, then collapses
and dies of a mysterious “heart attack.” The police, led by Detective Josh
Stone (Houston Rhines), order an autopsy and a toxicology test, and finally
determine that Lauren died of an overdose of colchicine, an herbal drug derived
from autumn crocus (Colchicum autumnale) described in Wikipedia (we actually see the Wikipedia page for autumn crocus in the film) as
having a “narrow therapeutic index,” meaning that the drug is lethal in large
quantities and the difference between what dose will do you good and what dose
will do you in is very small. One problem with this movie is that once Lauren
exits, there goes the one character we actually like — though in an inspired touch the characters
continue to listen to Lauren’s motivational recordings, thereby giving her a
weird ghost-like quality through which she continues to “haunt” the action even
in a non-supernatural story. The writers clearly intended to maintain the
suspense over which of the
remaining principals in the family was trying to do in all the others, but the
title Lifetime slapped on their work (replacing an almost-as-revealing working
title, The Protégé) makes it all
too obvious to us.
Charlie has
already begun to relapse after his mom’s sudden and mysterious death, and while
his own relapse extends only to alcohol, not drugs, Maya traces him to a spot
in the Hollywood Hills (interestingly for a Lifetime movie, Los Angeles is
actually appearing as itself instead of being “played” by Anywhere, Canada)
where he’s listening to his mom’s CD’s on his car stereo and getting ready to
get drunk. She overpowers him and gives him a big shot of morphine, then pushes
him off the cliff — though, miraculously, he survives but is comatose for the
next few days. Charlie ends up in the hospital and the suspense is over whether
he will ever come to and what he will say about his experience if he does. Only
just when the hospital staff treating him say he’ll be conscious and able to be
interrogated the next morning, Maya dons scrubs and sneaks into the hospital to
give him another hot shot of morphine by putting it in his IV, putting him under
again for a few more acts and arousing the suspicions of Detective Stone that somebody is trying to kill his potential star witness, and
that somebody probably also killed Lauren. She plants the syringe she used for
this in Ian’s belongings at the studio, thereby framing him and leading
Detective Stone to arrest him, only Amanda finally figures out the plot when she catches Maya flirting
with Ian: Maya was the mystery woman Ian had the affair with three years
earlier (ya remember the affair?)
and Maya was so angry that Ian finally rejected her and went back to his wife
that she set out to destroy the entire family and take over the yoga studio for
herself. In the big climax — a bit of which we saw in the opening scene as a
premonition — Maya straps Amanda to one of those weird inversion tables on
which you can turn yourself upside down, only she doesn’t strap her down well
enough: fortunately Amanda is able to free herself and ultimately kill Maya
with the knife Maya was threatening to use on her.
The tag scene establishes
that Amanda will remain in the town and assume her family destiny on the Iron
Throne — oops, I mean the yoga studio — though Chiappetta and Schubert don’t do
much with the hint of a romantic interest between Amanda and Detective Stone (there’s
a brief scene in which we see Stone stroking Amanda’s thigh and her not
resisting, but not much more is made of that). The film was directed by Daphne
Zuniga, who has 79 credits on imdb.com as an actress (the one I can remember
seeing is Mel Brooks’ Star Wars
spoof Spaceballs, in which she
played the Carrie Fisher role) but only two as director: this film and a
documentary on the TED talks. Like a lot of other Lifetime directors,
especially the female ones (one thing I like about Lifetime is they’ve given a
lot more opportunities to women directors than just about anyone else in the
business, and at least two of them, Christine Conradt and Vanessa Parise, have
shown themselves fully worthy to direct theatrical features), Zuniga turns in
an excellent job but is hamstrung by a script that is sometimes genuinely
powerful (I particularly like the way Lauren’s recorded voice haunts the other
characters via her motivational tapes even after she’s gone) and sometimes just
silly, and she’s also hampered by the fact that once Lauren exits there’s no
one left in the story we actually like. Amanda is a greedy bitch, Ian a creep who can’t keep his dick in his
pants, Charlie a whiny weakling, Maya — well, we’ve already been told to hate
her by the title — and Stone the usual small-town police idiot who all too
easily falls for Maya’s frame of Ian.
