Caught in His Web (Assemble Media, Cyber Productions, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On the Lifetime TV-movie schedule online I had spotted a Lifetime movie I had previously missed, Caught in His Web, which was co-executive produced by Whoopi Goldberg, who was sufficiently impressed with it that she promoted it on one of the late-night talk shows. It turned out to be surprisingly good, a gripping tale of three high-school freshmen – or, rather, freshwomen – in a small town and the male cyber-bully who torments them. The girls are Emma Lawrence (Alison Thornton), who fell into the web of the mysterious cyber-bully “Blake” when he posed as a woman and joined a Web site for Queer students to troll for Lesbian victims with whom he could carry on a mock flirtation; Olivia (Malia Baker), a Black girl whose father is a minister and is so hung up on what her parents will think of her she won’t tell them anything about the ways she’s being traumatized; and Gabby (Emma Tremblay), an aspiring photographer whose teacher notices that her grades are slipping – she hasn’t even developed the rolls of film she shot for her last two class assignments – because she’s so wrapped up in the trauma of being cyber-stalked. “Blake” blackmails his victims into sending him nude photos of themselves by threatening that if they don’t, he will do mass e-mails to their classmates revealing their most closely-held and embarrassing secrets.

The film’s true heroine is Detective Holland (Garcelle Beauvais), an African-American woman police officer in a town so small she’s the police force’s only detective. While everyone else in town, including both her fellow officers and the high-school principal (Tosca Baggoo) who ignored the complaints of the three victims, couldn’t care less, Detective Holland takes the case to heart, ignoring her other cases to focus on it. Detective Holland lives with her father, a white-haired Black man who flirts with various hobbies, including home gardening (there’s a grimly amusing scene in which they sit down to have dinner together and the entire meal is one tomato, which they have to split: the rest of her dad’s crop got eaten by raccoons). He briefly developed an interest in computers before switching to gardening, and during that time he took an extension class at the local community college. Detective Holland seeks out the teacher of that class, and instead of the older Black man I was hoping for because I was hoping writer Danielle Iman would create a romantic interest, the teacher turns out to be a young white woman with whom Holland partners to catch the mysterious “Blake.” Though I think writer Iman revealed “Blake’s” true identity midway through the film, which was way too early in my view, Holland and the computer science teacher are able to deduce that the cyber-stalker lives in town (he’s way too familiar with the victims’ whereabouts to be someone from another town or city) and are able to trace his true identity: Nathan (Berkley Duffield), an assistant at the local hardware store who seemed to me to be, if not drop-dead gorgeous, at least cute enough he shouldn’t have to resort to cyber-stalking to get dates.

With half the film’s running time left to go, and Nathan getting himself fired from the hardware store over his extracurricular activities (his boss doesn’t know what Nathan is really doing but it’s clearly affecting his work and scaring their customers), the trick for Detective Holland is getting the evidence to prove it. Since Nathan is good at erasing his phones and laptops to obliterate all the evidence against him – and the small town’s police department can’t afford either the time or the money to recover the erased data from his devices – the case looks hopeless until Nathan decides to get his revenge by “outing” Emma. This causes Emma to attempt suicide – though, blessed be, writer Iman allows her to recover – and it gives Detective Holland and her unlikely partner the evidence they need finally to go after him. When Nathan is caught and pleads guilty rather than face trial, Emma is allowed to give a “victim impact statement” in which she talks about how glad she is to have regained power over her life. Caught in His Web, despite its silly and punning title, is actually a quite good movie, well directed by Hannah Cheesman, a quite accomplished Canadian filmmaker with two theatrical features under her belt, The Definites and The Boathouse (the latter won top prize at the 2021 Rhode Island Film Festival – who knew there was a Rhode Island Film Festival in 2021?), and on the strength of this effort she looks like a director to watch, who not only kept the suspense and terror but also managed to get excellent performances from all her cast members. Lifetime is ballyhooing the opportunities they’re giving to women filmmakers during Women’s History Month, but Cheesman takes her place alongside Christine Conradt and Vanessa Parise as women directors of real talent and promise whose later careers we will be worth waiting for.