If Walls Could Talk (Reel One Entertainment, Maple Island Films, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night at 8 p.m. I put on the latest Lifetime “premiere,” If Walls Could Talk, about the fictitious Garland family: white husband Eric (Britt George), Black wife (of 25 years) Rebecca (Nicole Danielle Watts) and their daughter Olivia (Margo Parker, who at least looks light enough to be believable as the daughter of a mixed-race couple: kudos to Paul Ruddy, the film’s casting director!). They live in the middle of a small town in Everywhere, U.S.A. (and it appears they actually shot this in the U.S rather than have us “played” by Everywhere, Canada!) and Eric runs an investment company, though in recent years he’s been short-changing his customers in order to build up a fund so Olivia can go to graduate school. Olivia comes home for a visit and poltergeist-ish things start happening, including refrigerator doors that open themselves and a shower that turns itself on and spills water all over the floor. It all seems harmless enough until all that shower water causes Eric to slip, fall and die from his injuries.

Olivia arranges for leaves of absence from both her school and her job (writer Lisa Frame never bothers to tell us exactly what she’s studying or what her job is) to take care of her grieving mother, whose state becomes worse when she has a fall down the big staircase that dominates the living room and leads to the house’s second story. She shatters her knee and is kept in the hospital overnight for “observation,” after which Rebecca is free to go home – only, understandably, she has become convinced the house is haunted and she doesn’t want to stay there anymore. Rebecca urges her daughter Olivia to find them another place to live – but Olivia is too attached to the house because it was part of her father’s legacy: it was built by his grandparents, originally as a rooming house but when Eric’s grandparents started having kids of their own they decided to get rid of their roomers and use the house for themselves and their family. Odd things keep happening to the house and the surviving Garlands, including Rebecca receiving phone calls from her dead husband (or at least from her dead husband’s cell phone, since she’s scared shitless when she gets a phone call and the caller ID shows his name and photo), and an arm which comes out of the door to the attic and grabs Rebecca.

Meanwhile Olivia is visiting her dad’s office, collecting his old client files, and she learns for the first time that a lot of irate clients want to call the office so they could cancel their accounts forthwith. That was Olivia’s – and Rebecca’s, too – first hint that there was anything wrong or untoward with Eric’s business. While on her return trip from Eric’s office, Olivia nearly runs down a nice young man, and at first we think (I thought, anyway) it was another hallucination but it turns out to be a real person: Jake Winters (played by the drop-dead gorgeous Connor Floyd), who invites Olivia for coffee and gives her his card, which announces that he’s a physical therapist. As luck would have it, Rebecca’s latest injuries have put her in need of one, and Jake gets offered the job. Rebecca likes him almost as much as her daughter does (albeit not in the same way!), and she eagerly hires him – only the mysterious goings-on still keep going on and at one point Olivia catches someone who looks like Jake snoop around the house after dark.

At first I thought the villainess was going to be Rebecca;s best friend Agnes Crutcher (Meredith Thomas), a white woman who’s her next-door neighbor and has been ostensibly supporting her all this time, but when Agnes orders security cameras for the Garland home Olivia goes to her place and finds Agnes dead, her throat slit. Then it turns out that Olivia grabs the security equipment from where the delivery person left it and installs it herself, only the cameras keep going down and it turns out someone keeps removing their batteries. Olivia also learns from her dad’s old files that John Winters, Jake’s dad, was one of the clients who was suing Eric for stealing his money, and for a while it looks like the mystery man who attacked Rebecca is turning out to be John Winters – especially since the man playing him looks sufficiently like an older version of Connor Floyd it’s believable they could be father and son. But the killer turns out to be someone whose existence we haven’t suspected before: Peter Rawlings, yet another victim of Eric’s scam who ended up homeless and broke from the funds he had invested with Eric’s company.

It does seem odd that a peripheral character whom we haven’;t seen or heard of before would turn out to be the principal bad guy – he even physically moved into the Garlands’ attic and lived there (and left a stink, obviously from his own shit since he couldn’t attract attention by using the Garlands’ bathrooms) so he could torment them. In the end Olivia agrees to sell the house and it turns out the Garlands get enough money from it to pay off all Eric’s investors with enough money left over to finance Olivia’s graduate education (ya remember her graduate education?), and the two women plus Jake, who clearly is on his way to become Olivia’s mate, end up together in a small apartment with enough chairs salvaged from the big house and all their photo albums from their time with Eric (magically cleaned up from Peter Rawlings’ vandalism of them), whom they still remember fondly even though they now know he was a crook. If Walls Could Talk is yet another Lifetime movie helmed by a woman director – in this case, Mariah Murlowski, who according to her Facebook page was born on May 21, 1998, is single and loves dogs. Apparently she was previously a costume designer before she got a shot at directing, and in If Walls Could Talk she actually does a first-rate job in building suspense and terror but she was hamstrung by Lisa Frame’s terrible script and I’d really like to see her get better material for her next directorial effort.