by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime movie turned out to be an unusually
good one even though it traces its roots not only to other Lifetime productions
but even farther back, to all those 1930’s movies in which a nice, innocent
young man gets caught up in a crime ring, has a crisis of conscience, then ends
up risking both criminal prosecution by the authorities and murder by the
gangsters in his attempts to get out and regain his integrity. The movie,
produced by Incendo Media and filmed in Montreal — a lot of Lifetime movies are
shot in Canada but not that many have this many French names in the crew (the
director was Jean-François Rivard, the cinematographer Serge Desrosiers, the
costume designer Anie Fisette, and the executive producer Jean Bureau — “and
his business partner, Pierre Armoire,” I joked) — was based on a script by a
writer with the non-French name James Phillips. It was called Secrets of the
Sisterhood — though the first words of the
title were added later and apparently it was just filmed as The
Sisterhood — and, this being Lifetime, the
innocent person sucked into a crime ring was a woman, Ashley Shields (Claire
Coffee, a name which also seems to be designed to inspire bad jokes). As the
film opens she’s going through a bitter divorce from her husband Rick
(Christine Jadah), her workaholic schedule has alienated her daughter Grace
(Taylor Thorne) from her, and she’s also having to deal at work (she’s an
accountant) with a creepy boss named Frank (Guido Cocomello), who denies her a
promotion she deserved but hints that the next one might be hers if … well,
let’s just say he’s obviously an honors graduate of the Harvey Weinstein School
of Management. As if that weren’t enough tsuris in her life, Ashley suddenly gets a visit from her
scapegrace sister Jasmine (Siobhan Murphy), who tells her she’s been clean and
sober for nine months now and she owes it all to this great new women’s
empowerment group she’s joined called “The Sisterhood,” led by self-help author
Desiree Holt (Lisa Berry), a tall, striking, charismatic Black woman who’s highlighted
the top of her hair blonde. She leads the meetings of “The Sisterhood” in a
ceremonial robe and a number of the group’s sessions are held with her acolytes
dressed in long white costumes that look like something from The
Handmaid’s Tale.
Given Lifetime’s usual
iconography, one doesn’t expect an African-American character — particularly an
African-American woman — to be the villain (usually Black women in Lifetime
movies are the heroine’s best friends who stumble onto the villains’ plots but
get killed before they can expose them), but Lisa Berry rises to the challenge
and turns in a vivid but controlled performance expressing total
self-righteousness and unscrupulousness under a thin veneer of projecting
herself as a social servant. Her acting dominates the film, but then in this
sort of story the villain is usually more interesting than the good guys,
anyway. Claire Coffee makes a good innocent — or maybe not-so-innocent —
victim, eager to launder money for the Sisterhood but also warning Desiree that
she shouldn’t get too greedy and expect to channel too much income from the
Sisterhood to the other businesses she owns. (One wonders why Desiree doesn’t
go the route L. Ron Hubbard took with Scientology: incorporate The Sisterhood
as a religion.) As the movie progresses, Claire learns that the Sisterhood’s
activities include extortion, blackmail (that creepy boss of Claire’s finally
gives her a raise after the Sisterhood discovers something on him — we’re never
told what but we assume it was something sexual — and at one point he gives
Claire a manila envelope full of cash and tells her to pass it on to them),
terrorist beatings of former members and even murder. Claire gets appointed the
Sisterhood’s treasurer after the previous one, Pamela Redman (Eleanor Noble),
threatened to leak information about the group’s crimes to the media, and later
she tries to reach out to Pamela. Knowing how far the group’s reach extends —
at one point Claire is stopped by Myra (Caitlin Sponheimer), a cop she met in
the Sisterhood without realizing Myra was a cop, just to hammer home the point that if she reports them to the
authorities it will be futile because they have so many members in law
enforcement word will filter back to Desiree and she will extract retribution —
Pamela offers to meet Claire but puts her through an elaborate set of
instructions, regularly calling her on a “burner” cell phone to tell her where
to meet next, to no avail as Pamela is killed in her home (in her bathtub, with
her wrists slashed to make it look like she killed herself).
Later Claire wires
herself to record Desiree ordering her to commit money laundering and
extortion, but the supposed “journalist” she gives the recording to is yet
another Sisterhood member, and this leads to a climax in which Desiree not only
decides that Claire has to be killed to protect the group’s secrets, but her
sister Jasmine (ya remember Jasmine?)
will have to do the dirty deed herself to prove her own loyalty and “make her
bones.” When Jasmine refuses, Desiree has two of the other Sisters pull a
plastic bag over her head, only she’s rescued in the nick of time thanks to
Claire’s belated realization that she knows at least one police officer who isn’t part of the Sisterhood:
Julie (Michelle Ohm), the policewoman her husband Rick (ya remember Rick?) left her for. The finish shows Desiree and her key
henchwomen busted, Jasmine facing a prison term, Claire released on probation
but barred from ever working as an accountant again, and her homey announcement
that from now on she’s just going to concentrate on being “a mom.” Secrets
of the Sisterhood is actually a
better-than-average Lifetime film, with more multidimensional characterizations
than we’re used to (especially from a Lifetime script not written by Christine Conradt), genuine crises of
conscience powering the plot, and above all a wonderfully chilling performance
by Lisa Berry as a character whose motives — particularly her descent from
honest self-help leader to head of a criminal enterprise — are kept powerfully ambiguous
in James Phillips’ script. Well directed by Rivard, who throws all the neo-noir tricks into a film another Lifetime director might
have shot on autopilot, Secrets of the Sisterhood is the sort of diamond in the rough we veteran
Lifetime watchers hope for and all too rarely get!
