Secrets in a Small Town (Fella Films, Paunch Pictures, Line Films, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After last night’s “Premiere” Lifetime showed a movie that turned out even better, despite a dorky title like Secrets in a Small Town. (The original working title was Nowhere, but it was obviously changed because Lifetime assumes its audiences have to have the story spelled out for them in a title and won’t go for something as ambiguous and curiosity-inducing as Nowhere.) That sounds like it’s going to be about a woman who moves from a big city to a small town and exposes all manner of secrets — political, financial and sexual. Instead it’s about a heroine, Claire Porter (Kate Drummond), who after the death of her husband from cancer in Chicago moves to a generic Midwestern small town to take a job as the vice-principal of the local high school. Things are complicated by the fact that she has a teenage daughter, Sarah (Nell Verlaque), who will be attending the high school where Claire will be an administrator. The first day of school for both Porters, Sarah is alone in the gym shooting hoops when she’s spotted by the women’s basketball coach, Ruth Simmons (Rya Kihlstedt), who notices that she never seems to miss (c’mon, director and co-writer Thomas Michael, even Michael Jordan missed once in a while!) and invites her to join the school basketball team, the “Vipers,” who even though they’re playing in a small town in the middle of nowhere and their season is winding down have hopes of winning the national championship.

Sarah plays her first game as a Viper and then is invited to join her teammates for a special “bonding” party — and when mom wants to come along and keep an eye on Sarah, she’s told in no uncertain terms that this is for team members only. That’s also what she’s told when she asks if there will be males at the party, so she’s reassured even though it’s already been established that Sarah is chafing at her mom’s overprotectiveness. Sarah even calls her a “helicopter mom” and says she’s always hovering over her. Things take a dark turn when Sarah leaves for that “bonding party” and never returns — during that long evening she neither calls nor texts her mom, as Claire had asked her to — and in the morning Claire wakes up and finds her daughter is still out. At first her complaints to the police and others result in a lot of hostility from the various townspeople — especially since the Vipers team is virtually the only thing they have that’s attracting any positive attention from the outside worid — and it seems like the only support Claire is getting is from Coach Ruth. Fortunately, the local sheriff (Ron Lea) assigns Sarah’s disappearance to a compactly built, bearded deputy named Rick Watchorn (Al Mukadam), who takes the case seriously and organizes a search party, recruiting the townspeople and dividing them into three groups, each assigned to a different sector of the hilly forest that surrounds the town, in an operation that reminded me of the hunt for the Monster in the original 1931 film of Frankenstein. Midway through the hunt Sarah is actually found, badly wounded but still alive, in a small shed in the middle of the forest.

Unfortunately, the girl who found her is Coach Ruth’s daughter, Kat Simmons (Joelle Foster), and she does the obvious thing and calls to her mother — only Coach Ruth tells her daughter that since she’d earlier told the police Sarah was dead, she’ll only get into trouble if she tells them anything different now and for the sake of her own future Kat needs to keep her mouth shut. Then she methodically and cruelly closes the shed and puts a padlock on the door so Sarah can’t get out and no one can get in to rescue her even if anyone passes by and hears her call out. Coach Ruth’s sudden transformation from seemingly understanding, sympathetic adult figure to the “new girl in school” to a black-hearted villain ready to let Sarah die in the wilderness reminded me of Louise Lewis’s marvelous performance in a similar role in an otherwise forgettable 1958 American International “B” called Blood of Dracula, and Rya Kihlstedt’s performance as both sides of the character is excellent. From that point on the conflicts driving this film reach an almost primal intensity — Sarah’s struggle to remain alive and conscious locked in a shed with no food, no way to use the bathroom and no realistic hope of escape (remember that she was already severely injured when she ended up in the shed, and director/co-writer Thomas Michael and his co-writer Paolo Mancini carefully sustain the suspense as to what happened to Sarah between leaving for the team party and ending up in the shed); Claire’s single-minded determination to find her daughter, alive or dead, and make whoever abducted and possibly killed her pay; the local population’s willingness to help but tempered by an awareness that they don’t want to make the Vipers’ team look bad and blow their town’s one chance for national recognition; and even Ruth, for whom Michael and Mancini supply an explanation for what made her “run” that makes her at least understandable.

As a diversion, Ruth plants Sarah’s cell phone (which she recovered back when she and her daughter found Sarah in the shed) in a boat and floats it down the river to divert the search away from where she and we know Sarah to be — only the plan backfires when the police recover the phone and give it to Claire. Claire watches an embedded video on it that shows exactly what happened to her daughter at that “bonding” party — contrary to Ruth’s solemn insistence that she didn’t allow hazing on the team, Sarah got hazed big-time, including having a wide plastic hose stuck down her throat so she was forced to drink massive quantities of some (unspecified, though presumably beer from a keg) alcoholic beverage, and then being taken to the edge of a cliff, blindfolded and led there with a rope tied around her. Ruth’s daughter Kat was supposed to lead her to the edge of the cliff and keep her from going over, only Kat lost control of the rope, Sarah fell off the cliff and the other girls left her for dead. Earlier Ruth had told Claire that she herself was hazed in the U.S. military when she was the only woman in her unit in Afghanistan (it’s a measure of just how long this stupid and pointless war — the longest the U.S. has ever been involved in as a nation — that someone could have served there, returned home and had a daughter who as of 2019 is a teenager) and it taught her that no one should ever have to go through that … only what it really taught her is that hazing builds strength and if she wants a game-winning basketball team she should let the stronger players haze the weaker ones and thus cull the herd until only the strongest survive.

After Claire sees the video of her daughter being essentially tortured, she goes to Ruth’s house — Ruth is out but her daughter Kat, whose crisis of conscience has been one of the strongest elements in this film, confesses all to Claire and gives her enough information that Claire can report to the police where Sarah really is and Deputy Watchorn organizes a helicopter flight to rescue her. Only it’s a race against time because Ruth has found out that her daughter ratted her out — she responds first by slapping her so hard she nearly knocks her out, then once again chewing her out for jeopardizing both their futures for some girl they barely know — and instead of just leaving Sarah in a locked shed to die, Ruth has decided to hurry the process along by digging a D.I.Y. grave and burying Sarah alive. At the climax Claire sees what Ruth is doing, rushes her and knocks her down — only Ruth pulls a gun on Claire. Deputy Watchorn pulls his own gun on Ruth and tells her to drop hers, but Ruth is still determined to kill Sarah. Claire gets on the ground to shield Sarah’s body with her own, but eventually Watchorn is able to get the drop on Ruth after Claire is able to get her to fall by pulling on the tarp Ruth was standing on. For once in a Lifetime movie, the principal villain is actually taken into custody alive instead of being killed off by some sort of authorial fiat — and her daughter is also arrested, though we can hope she’ll be treated leniently since she did give Claire the key information about where Sarah was.

Secrets in a Small Town isn’t exactly the freshest material plot-wise, but like Sorority Secrets (only even more so) it’s given power and distinction by the excellence of the execution. Thomas Michael gets great performances from both his female leads: not only does he support Rya Kihlstedt by making Ruth a complex figure instead of just a cardboard Lifetime villainess, he’s able to make Claire an overwhelming revenge figure, far more intense than the typical Lifetime mother trying to rescue her damsel daughter from distress. The wall of opposition and hostility Claire originally faces from the townspeople — including the rather supercilious boss who asks her to take a leave of absence as vice-principal “until this is over” (which ticks off Claire no end because she can hear the clear intimation in the man’s voice: “until we find your daughter’s body”) and the guy who vandalizes her garage door with the words “WITCH HUNT” (who does he think he is, President Trump?) and either him or someone else who slashes the left front tire of Claire’s car (though she doesn’t stop to change it; she just drives around with a flat tire until she can get to the authorities and give them the key information) — only adds to the peculiar intensity of the film. Thomas Michael’s imdb.com page lists him mostly as a writer and actor (and he’s got the dark, smoldering good looks to be quite effective as the latter!), but though he only has six directorial credits (including two shorts and an “announced” project called You’re Killing Me!) it’s clear he has a real future as both writer and director.