Sinfidelity (Curmudgeon Films, Storyworks Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was of a movie called Sinfidelity, produced by “Curmudgeon Films” and “Storyworks Entertainment,” directed by Tamer Halpern and co-written by him and Daniel Bruckner. I couldn’t help but wonder if the fact that this film was created by men had something to do with its being far less sensitive and complex than the previous night’s “premiere,” Deranged Granny, which was written and directed by women and was far more creative in its deployment of Lifetime’s cliches. Sinfidelity’s title and promos promised a much better movie than the one Messrs. Halpern and Bruckner delivered. The film opens with its best and most chilling scene: a young man follows the woman who’s just dumped him into a roller rink where they’re playing loud techno, stalks her with his camera, corners her and stabs her to death, photographing her all the while and (we learn later) carefully saving the prints and putting them in an album so he can relive the experience. Then we get a “Ten Years Later” chyron and we meet the lead couple, Greg (Mark Jude Sullivan) and Angela (Jade Tailor), and their prepubescent daughter Vivian (Piper Blair). Greg is the president of an Internet start-up that’s about to be acquired by a major company and make him a lot of money. Angela doesn’t really need to work but she runs a boutique wine business out of her home.

To facilitate the deal Greg has hired two people, an accountant named Franco (Aidan Bristow) to ensure his books are in order and can withstand a major company’s due diligence, and a personal assistant named Lisa (Caroline Cole) with whom Greg is working a lot of late nights. Earlier Greg had had an affair while Angela was pregnant with Vivian, and from those long nights as well as the goo-goo eyes Greg and Lisa are making at each other during the party to celebrate the upcoming acquisition, she becomes convinced that Greg and Lisa are having an affair. With Franco cruising her big-time at the same party, and later offering to help with the books of her wine business (she knows more about vintages than she does about accounting and her customers and suppliers are getting restless about her business sloppiness), she decides to yield to Franco’s advances for a revenge fuck of her own. She regards it as a one-night stand and feels guilty about it almost as soon as it happens -- and she feels even guiltier when she learns those late nights her husband was spending with Lisa were planning sessions for the super-trip to Italy he was going to surprise Angela with as soon as the money from the acquisition came through.

Franco not only has become romantically obsessed with Angela, but though none of the other characters know it yet we realize from his hobby of photography and the old film camera he uses (he has a darkroom in his home and develops his own pictures) that he’s the stalker and killer we saw in the prologue. Like most Lifetime villains he escalates as the film progresses, planting spyware on Angela’s smartphone (allegedly it’s accounting software but it gives him the ability to track her everywhere he goes and even to watch her bedroom as she and Greg have make-up sex) and threatening to sabotage Greg’s acquisition deal by rewriting the books to make Greg seem either incompetent or crooked. Franco also forces Angela to record what amounts to a hostage tape, saying that she cheated on Greg (which she did) and she’s in love with Franco (which she isn’t). Needless to say, Angela also has a Black best friend, Claire (Blythe Howard), who advised her to have the revenge affair in the first place and whose ex-husband (whom we never see), whom she dumped because he was having an affair, is a private detective. Angela asks Claire to get in touch with her ex to see if Angela can hire him to get the goods on Franco -- only Franco eavesdrops on the conversation and keeps that from happening by picking up Claire and having sex with her.

Only Claire stumbles into Franco’s darkroom, sees his collection of snuff photos and realizes Angela’s in mortal danger -- but she meets the fate of all too many of the heroines’ African-American best friends and gets killed by Franco, who puts her in a bondage pose in his bed and then stabs her for his latest series of snuff pics. Eventually, to no one’s particular surprise, Franco tries to get Angela to leave her husband for him by kidnapping Vivian (ya remember Vivian?) and tying him up; Angela retrieves a gun from a safe but Franco easily takes it away from her, only while his back is turned Angela realizes where her husband is, frees him and in a Free Soul-style ending Greg “grows a pair” by shooting down his wife’s paramour. If Deranged Granny was an artful and creative redeployment of LIfetime cliches, Sinfidelity (despite a genuinely creative title) is an all too obvious by-the-numbers exploitation of them, almost as if Halpern and Bruckner had a checklist by their computer and ticked off every familiar plot element as they included it.

They deserve points for the different styles of music used in the various scenes -- the icy EDM of the prologue, the cool jazz played at the party where Franco first cruises Angela and the tear-in-my-beer laments heard at the country bar where he takes her as the final stop before he brings her to his place to have sex with her. But it doesn’t help that Sinfidelity is surprisingly weakly cast, especially in the man-meat department; in most Lifetime movies about dastardly male seducers one’s used to being able to ogle a nice hunk even while knowing he’s going to be playing the black-hearted villain, but not this time: Aidan Bristow as the bad guy looks way too much like Mark Jude Sullivan as the man he’s cuckolding, and though there’s a soft-core porn scene between him and Jade Tailor director Halpern shoots it too ineptly to get the sexual frisson we want. If some Lifetime movies have triumphed over stupid titles, Sinfidelity is the opposite: a great title yoked to a dull and mediocre film.