by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 8 p.m. I watched the first installment of what’’s
being billed as a three-part Lifetime movie called “Thrillogy” (a truly
dreadful pun) shown under the umbrella title Obsession — I’m tempted to joke that one could hardly find a
Lifetime movie for which Obsession
would not be a suitable title.
This first episode was called Obsession: Stalked by My Lover, and the central character is a young photography
student named Madison Turner (Celeste Desjardins, whom I’ve seen on Lifetime
credits before and is a good enough actress to put at least some meat on the clichéd bones of the typical Lifetime
heroine) who’s in an unfulfilling relationship with boyfriend Dylan Seeble
(Jason Hicks) — she’s considering leaving him because he lives in a frat house
that always reeks of beer and other young-male odors (and though the
screenwriters probably weren’t intending this at all, I found myself wondering
if he was supposed to be Gay and have a crush, unrequited or otherwise, on the
older student who’s his “frat brother” Ronnie Munn, played by Nicolas James
Wilson) and, though at one point they sleep together at her place, that’s all they do: they fall asleep, both fully dressed, in
her bed. Madison’s African-American best friend (oh, no, not another African-American best friend!), Rachel Kingston,
counsels Madison when her roommate abruptly moves out and her roommate ad on
her phone is answered by three people, two women and one man. On Rachel’s
urging, Madison picks the man even though we know, though she doesn’t, that he’s really a
particularly vicious crook who’s currently going by the name “Blake Connors”
but has had others. He moves in with Madison and at first they’re just supposed
to be roommates — though Madison’s sort-of boyfriend Dylan is instantly jealous
and suspicious of him — but eventually the combination of proximity and hotness
(and Travis Nelson, who plays Blake, is way better looking than Jason Hicks even though he oddly doesn’t seem
to have much in the basket department) works its way on Madison and the two end
up pumping away at each other (even though this time around director Alexander
Carrière doesn’t show much of the soft-core porn that makes so many Lifetime
movies fun).
When Madison isn’t at home doing the down ’n’ dirty with her new
“roommate” or working late at night in the campus darkroom (it’s established
that she has a digital camera but prefers to do her more “artistic” projects on
film), she’s got a problematic relationship with her family in general and her
sister, Evie Brotman (Kelly Hope Taylor), in particular. It seems their parents
died in an accident when Madison was 10 and Madison expected her 15-year-older
sister to take her in; instead Big Sis felt too overwhelmed to take
responsibility for raising a child and palmed her off on their grandparents.
The grandparents are just about to have their annual policy and Madison is
looking forward to it being at a restaurant, but instead Evie insists on
hosting it herself. Dylan is supposed to pick up Madison and be her “date” to
the party, but he doesn’t show because that afternoon he and his “frat brother”
Ronnie decide to go for a hike at the nearby Angel’s Path, and they can’t get
back in time because Blake has followed them out there and stolen it. Actually,
he hasn’t stolen it himself; he’s just reported its location to pawnshop owner
Darryl Wallace (Michael Dickson), his contact for a ring of car thieves for
whom Blake stalks stealable vehicles as his primary source of income — though
he’s also often asking Darryl to stake him for other sorts of criminal ventures
and Darryl is always putting out his hand to demand a cut. When Dylan doesn’t
show to pick up Madison and take her to her grandparents’ party, Blake drives
her there as his guest and surprisingly makes a good impression. He makes a
particularly good impression on Evie, who buys into Blake’s phony identity as a
home security consultant and offers him $5,000 to bug her bedroom so she can
catch her husband Kirk (Tomas Chovanec) having sex with his office assistant in
the marital bed. Evie also introduces Blake to her neighbor Jenna Rothstein (a
quite good Sophie Gendron), who took her ex-husbant to the cleaners after she
caught him cheating and now has
their house and a large fortune so she doesn’t have to work and she spends her
time cruising younger, cuter guys and having sex with them. Jenna sets her
sights on Blake the moment she first eyes him, but what he’s really interested in Jenna is not sex (after all, he’s
regularly screwing the far younger, cuter Madison!) but the expensive jewelry
she’s collected over the years and hidden in a safe in her bedroom.
Blake
accepts Jenna’s offer of a job putting in a new home security system, but he
also includes a camera in her bedroom aimed at the safe so he can get footage
of her opening it and read off the combination, so later he can break in and
burglarize her. Only Evie gets suspicious of Blake when he gets the footage of
her husband screwing his girlfriend but holds out for an additional $15,000 to
give her the tape — otherwise he’ll sell it to Kirk as evidence that his wife
is spying on him and she’ll likely get divorced but with no money. Dylan — ya remember Dylan? —
also gets suspicious of Blake and traces him to Jenna’s and to the pawnshop,
addresses he records on the “notebook” feature of his cell phone, but like all
too many stupid movie characters in the past, instead of taking down his
information and leaking it quietly to the police, he confronts Blake directly.
Blake pulls a gun on Dylan and forces him into Dylan’s own car — he intends to
drive Dylan out to Angel’s Path, kill him and fake it to look like a hiking
accident. Only his scheme unravels when Dylan’s friend Ronnie decides to give
Madison Dylan’s camera and his phone, and the camera includes photos of Dylan
being menaced and held at gunpoint by a driver whose face cannot be seen but
who has a logo on his sweater Madison later recognizes as Blake’s. The night
Evie’s neighbor Jenna leaves town for a conference in New York, Blake duly
breaks into Jenna’s home, opens the safe and steals the jewels. Evie calls the
police on 911 but the only cop who shows up is a bald Black guy in a patrol car
who knocks on the door, gets no response and drives away again. She finally
reaches Madison and warns her that Blake has just burglarized Jenna’s safe and
is probably coming there to flee the country and take Madison with him. This time the police are on the ball and stake out
Madison’s place, and though Madison narrowly escapes death when Blake realizes
she’s betrayed him and pulls a gun on her, ultimately the police arrest Blake
and Madison and Evie agree to move in together now that she won’t have a
husband much longer and the two sisters have patched up their differences now
that both of them have been
involved with no-good men.
The finale shows Blake being taken to prison in the
proverbial orange jumpsuit (stripes are so 20th century!), but a promo for the next film in the
series, Obsession: Escaping My Ex,
reveals that Blake escapes from prison, killing a man in the process, and comes
after Madison again out of little more than Melissa Cassera’s authorial fiat.
Christine Conradt was listed as one of the four “executive producers” on this
film but, alas, didn’t take a direct hand in writing it: if she had, Blake
would probably have been a more complex character and we’d have had a much
better idea of What Made Blake Run. About the only clue we get as to what
motivated Blake to a life of crime is that his sister, whom we see in one quite
powerful scene, is in a mental institution, where either private insurance or a
public program covers her room and board but everything else, including her
meds, Blake has to supply — yet another (probably) unwitting piece of Lifetime
propaganda in favor of single-payer: “If we had Medicare for All, the crime
rate would go down because people wouldn’t have to become criminals to pay for
their relatives’ health care” — an argument I don’t think even Bernie Sanders
has used for it! As it stands, Obsession: Stalked by My Lover is an O.K. Lifetime movie — it’s a bit better acted
than the norm (Travis Nelson in particular is very good at the James Dean
Smolder and I suspect he could have done a better job with the character if
he’d had the extra moral complexity typical of a Christine Conradt script, and
I also really liked Sophie Gendron as the slut Jenna) but without the flashes
of Gothic more inspired Lifetime directors than Alexander Carrière have brought
to similar plots. What I’m trying to fathom is why the major-domos at Lifetime
thought this, of all their
similar scripts, was worth spinning out into a three-part miniseries instead of
just leaving well enough alone with this as a one-off!
