by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan •All rights reserved
I watched last night’s Lifetime “Premiere” movie at 8 p.m., Stalked
by My Husband’s Ex — a title that’s doubly
inaccurate because not only are the leads, Kristen Carter (Alex McKenna) and
Ryan Munson (Adam Huss), not married until the very end of the film — though
they’re living together and co-parenting Ryan’s 10-year-old daughter Lisa (Joey
Rae Blair — a girl named Joey?), and Ryan is shown proposing to Kristen during
the film (with an expensive ring daughter Lisa picked out for him) — but
through a “surprise” twist writers Scott Collette and Dave Hickey (the two
collaborated on the “original” story but Collette wrote the actual script solo)
throw in about three-quarters of the way through the movie (more on that
later), Ryan’s “ex,” Nora Monson (a nice hang-dog performance by Juliana Dever)
actually isn’t the titular stalker. Stalked by My Husband’s Ex (an annoyingly clinical title, though imdb.com
doesn’t list a more creative working title Lifetime ordered changed) begins
with a prologue in which Ryan and Nora are in the final stages of a bitterly
contested divorce and Nora, a heavy-duty alcoholic, gets mega-upset when Ryan
wins a court order giving him sole custody of Lisa. In fact, she resents it so
much that she goes to Ryan’s home, kidnaps baby Lisa, takes her in her car —
and promptly crashes it. The police rescue baby Lisa and arrest Nora. She
serves a four-year prison sentence and, when next we see her, it’s 10 years
later and she’s having her final discharge interview with her probation
officer.
Only, being a Lifetime villainess, she can’t resist expressing her
bitterness over losing her daughter by being snippy with the probation officer
— so much so that we briefly wonder if he’s going to extend her probation or,
even worse, send her back to prison. Ultimately, he does neither, relying on
Nora’s glowing report on her success at work (even though she’s only had the
job three months) and her continued commitment to sobriety (she’s seen
fingering one of the chips AA gives you for not drinking for a particular length
of time). Nora immediately blows all of that once she sees Lisa’s social-media
posts celebrating the upcoming wedding of her dad and his long-time girlfriend.
At first she has enough willpower to walk past a store called “Santa Barbara
Liquor” (the whole film takes place in that affluent community), but eventually
she succumbs and within a couple of commercial breaks she’s blown off her job
and is sitting in a grungy room doing nothing but drinking and plotting to get
her daughter back. Meanwhile, Ryan and Kristen are sipping wine from tall
glasses — they’re probably doing as much drinking as Nora is, but they’re doing
it in classy circumstances in a house so lavish it practically becomes a
character in itself. We’re never told what Ryan does for a living, but Kristen
runs a resort called “Almost Paradise” she rents out for retreats and the like,
and needless to say she’s also planning to marry Ryan there with her best
friend Sierra Phillips (Melissa Ordway) as her maid of honor. Sierra
good-naturedly kids Kristen about her formerly poor taste in men, ridiculing
her ex-boyfriend Matt (Mike Erwin, who looks enough like Adam Huss we get the
impression Kristen has one and only one physical “type” of man she’s attracted
to), who like all Kristen’s other boyfriends until Ryan wanted her to give up
her career and stay at home as a housewife and baby-making machine.
Then the
stalking begins in earnest: Nora starts hanging out at Lisa’s school and
waiting for Lisa in her car — behaving for all the world like a legitimate
custodial parent — and when she’s alone she’s looking at Lisa’s social-media
posts expressing her joy at soon having another mother and swearing under her
breath, “She doesn’t need another mother. She needs me!” Then Nora ruins the engagement party her friend
Sierra threw her at Kirsten’s own resort by crashing it (in tacky-looking pants
that establish the class contrast with the designer outfits Kristen, Sierra and
their friends are wearing) and grabbing a drink to throw in Kristen’s face.
Nora then starts sending Lisa texts, impersonating an age-peer from another
school, and asking Lisa, “Do you want to meet your real mom?” Lisa
unhesitatingly answers, “Yes!” While all this has been going on Kristen’s best
friend Sierra borrows Kristen’s car and drives it home at night, and a
mysterious driver we presume is Nora chases the car and runs it off the road,
causing it to crash into a tree. Sierra is killed (though Sierra is white she
fulfills the character function usually reserved in Lifetime movies for the
heroine’s Black best friend: she
stumbles onto the villain’s plot but gets killed before she can reveal it) and
Kristen is broken up about it for various reasons, not the least of which is
that after all the kidding she’d endured from Sierra about all the Mr. Wrongs
in her life she really, really, really wanted Sierra to be the maid of honor when she finally married Mr.
Right. We also get at least a hint of What Makes Nora Run when Ryan tells
Kirsten that Nora’s father also served time in prison, and when Nora was 14 he
was released and sued for and won joint custody. The stress of being whipsawed
between two homes with two decidedly different parents and being unable to make
friends in either location started Nora’s drinking, Ryan tells Kristen (and us)
— a bit of backstory a writer like Christine Conradt could have used to make
Nora a figure of genuine pathos but which Collette and Hickey drop almost as
soon as they’ve introduced it.
The climax occurs at a grungy café to which Nora
has lured Lisa with the prospect of finally meeting her birth mother — we know
it’s grungy not only because it’s dark and the customers are dressed in
proletarian clothes but the music they’re playing on the sound system is bad,
lame country rather than bad, lame soft-rock. At first Lisa is happy to meet
her biological mom at long last after having heard almost nothing about her
from her dad all her life, but she starts getting spooked by Nora’s overall
weirdness (she’d ordered them both hot chocolates, but Lisa protests hers is
too hot to drink while, when Lisa wasn’t looking, Nora spiked her own with a
flask — a flask? How 1920’s!) and
she ducks into the café’s restroom, from which she hopes to escape. Ryan has
traced Lisa to the café — Nora told Lisa to turn off her cell phone but her dad
remembered that Lisa’s tablet is keyed to mirror the phone and can therefore
give him its (and Lisa’s) location — but Lisa couldn’t leave through the
bathroom window because it was barred. So she looked for a location in one of
the restaurant’s back rooms where she could hide. Nora goes looking for her and
can’t find her; then she hears Ryan and finds her own hiding place. Only when
Ryan hunts her down he finds [spoiler alert!] that Nora has just died, and when the cops arrive
they assume that Ryan strangled her and arrest him for murder. With Ryan held
in jail overnight because the courts won’t process him until the next day,
Kristen receives a box of items taken from her car when Sierra was run off the
road and killed in it. Then a mysterious figure appears in the back of her
house, which had me momentarily thinking that Collette and Hickey were going to
have Ryan turn out to be a psycho who murdered his ex-wife after all, the real stalker turns out to be [surprise!] Matt, Kristen’s ex. (So instead of calling the movie Stalked
by Her Husband’s Ex they should have called it Stalked by Her Ex — which would have been more
accurate but would also have given the game away.)
Surprisingly, the last
half-hour of Stalked by Her Husband’s Ex
proves considerably better than the hour-and-a-half which preceded it; director
Anthony C. Ferrante, who in the previous portions of the movie looked like he
was trying to sneak in bits of genuine excitement and suspense into a script
whose writers wouldn’t let him, finally comes alive, grabs hold of what he has
to work with and gives us a climax both viscerally exciting and genuinely
moving. And the writing, direction and acting of Matt bring this character
fully to life and make him a truly imposing Lifetime villain. He kidnaps Lisa
and leads Kristen on a wild-goose chase — instead of telling her the final
destination so she could summon the cops, he directs her via her cell phone
from one point to the next — that comes to an end in a large beachfront home
overlooking a cliff, where Matt is hiding Lisa out in the attic and threatening
to kill her unless Kristen goes along with his plan. His plan is to let Ryan
take the fall for Nora’s murder so Kristen will be rid of him, the two of them
can get back together and they can raise Lisa as their own. (Hey, I didn’t say
it was a good plan.) The writers
and director Ferrante actually do a good job of putting Kristen in dire and
seemingly inescapable peril, though they also do something silly: they have
Matt’s and Kristen’s final confrontation take place on a stretch of yard
directly next to the cliff, so we just know that they’re going to deliver Kristen from Matt’s
evil by having him slip and fall off the cliff to his death … and that indeed
happens. The tag scene shows Ryan and Kristen finally getting married at the Almost Paradise resort — with
daughter Lisa as their maid of honor as well as their ring-bearer. Stalked
by My Husband’s Ex could have been an even
better movie than it is if the writers and director hadn’t been working so hard
to set up that Big Surprise Twist at the end and if they, like their colleagues
on previous Lifetime movies, had made Nora a more complex, conflicted
character. As it stands, it’s an O.K. by-the-numbers Lifetime thriller until it
takes that unexpected detour of killing (who we think is) the principal villain
three-fourths of the way through and then suddenly becomes a work of rare
strength and power, especially by Lifetime standards!
