Picture Perfect Lies (Maple Island Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Sunday I watched a couple of movies on Lifetime, including a “premiere” of a film called Picture Perfect Lies, whose title is a pun on the fact that an old photo the heroine discovers gives her a big clue that helps her find out her real identity. The heroine is Rachel Collins (Megan Elizabeth Barker, who’s 28 years old but is supposed to be playing a teenager who as the story begins is having her 16th birthday party), who is there with her parents (Matthew Pohlkamp and Lifetime regular Laurie Fortier) and her aunt Jenny (Crystal Allen – which, ironically, was also the name of the Joan Crawford character in the 1939 film The Women). At the party Jenny tells Rachel that she’s about to give her the deep, dark secret of who she really is and where she came from, and just as both Rachel and we are being led to believe that it’s going to turn out Rachel was really Jenny’s daughter and the Collinses passed Jenny off as Rachel’s aunt when she was really her mom, Jenny falls and dies. At first everyone believes this was an accident – including us, since we’ve seen her carrying a flask and slipping alcohol into her ginger ale – until one of the police called to investigate the death finds a golf club with Jenny’s blood on it and they immediately assume she was murdered with it.

Rachel’s parents go hog wild installing new security systems inside the home, including bars on all the windows and security cameras in every room. They tell Rachel it’s to protect her from the unknown killer who knocked off Aunt Jenny, but Rachel gets suspicious, especially when she finds a photo Jenny had been keeping all these years of a little blonde girl at age four posed outdoors at a location called Echo Lake Park. Rachel and her boyfriend Brett (Jordan Frechtman), who looks something like Donny Osmond auditioning for a biopic of Elvis, go on the trail and manage to escape the attempts of Rachel’s (presumed) parents to hold her captive. Through the Internet they learn that Echo Lake Park is in Colorado and they drive from the L.A. area where this story started through Utah and into Colorado, where they learn [spoiler alert!] that Rachel’s real name was “Rebecca Tomlinson” and she was stolen from her real parents in Colorado by Jenny. It seems Mrs. Collins wanted a kid, and not being able either to conceive one au naturel or adopt through legitimate channels (the adoption agencies she went to all turned her down), she sent Jenny out literally shopping for a baby for her.

The photo Rachel discovered was essentially the sample picture Jenny snapped candidly and sent to the Collinses to get the O.K. that she should go ahead and kidnap her, and Jenny did it but never got over the guilt feelings about it. Rachel and Brett learned this by tracking down the guy Jenny dated in high school – who turned out to be a schlub with a menial job as groundskeeper in a city park – who remembered her as a bright, vivacious girl instead of the neurotic guilt-ridden drunk Rachel had known growing up. At her sweet 16 party Jenny had planned to tell Rachel the true story of where she came from and how she had got into the Collins family – only she and her sister got into an argument about it and sis clubbed her over the head with the golf implement so she couldn’t tell Rachel, then essentially turned the house into a prison to keep Rachel from escaping and finding out the truth on her own. Though handicapped by the casting of a 28-year-old woman as a 16-year-old girl, and also by the sheer preposterousness of the plot (wouldn’t the Tomlinsons have gone out looking for their daughter, and wouldn’t an amateur kidnapper like Jenny probably have left a trail a mile wide that would make it easy to apprehend her?), Picture Perfect Lies – directed by old Lifetime hand John Murlowski from a script by Rebeca Hughes and Samuel Hayes – is actually quite good. It’s highlighted by a marvelous performance by Laurie Fortier, who carefully calibrates her performance from apparently loving mother to vicious monster throughout the movie and does her best to make this hard-to-swallow plot believable – even though Lifetime’s promos, which showed her in full cry declaiming to poor Rachel, “I raised you! I’m your mother!”, rather gave the game away.