The Price of Perfection (Neshama Entertainbment, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night at 8 I watched an unusually good Lifetime movie: The Price of Perfection, directed by Alexander Carrière and written by Imogen Grace (she has eight imdb.com credits as an actress and three for her scripts, all for shorts, but she’s clearly got a major future as a writer). It starts out with a late-night car chase in which a young girl is running down a deserted back road on foot while an SUV, driven by we don’t yet know whom, is chasing her and finally runs her down. Then we see a Lifetime title,”Eight Days Earlier,” and eight days earlier high-school junior Ava James (Keara Graves) is shown running at a high-school track practicing for the relay team. Her coach announces that Ava will run the starting leg of the relay, even though she only joined the team three months previously, much to the displeasure of the blonde villainess, Madison Russell (Victoria Baldessara). It seems that in junior high school (Grace’s script still calls it that instead of that horrible modern-day term “middle school”) Ava and Madison were best friends until Madison placed a prank call one day posing as a young girl and phoning the girl’s mother. Since the girl had committed suicide, this was an especially cruel prank, and Madison weaseled out of punishment for it by blaming it on Ava. Ava is the daughter of Leslie James (Christy Bruce), who’s had to raise her as a single parent since the death of Leslie’s husband Bradley the year before. Leslie and Bradley were partners in a party-planning and catering business until Bradley’s death, and now Leslie is trying to hold the business together and deal with the usual bitchy prima donna-ism from her clients.

The business keeps Leslie away from home most nights and weekends, but she isn’t worried because Ava is Little Miss Perfect and is good at, among other things, taking care of her younger brother Ryan (Cameron Brodeur, one of the few people in the cast who actually looks young enough to be in high school), who’s been diagnosed with ADHD and put on Dexedrine. Only Ryan, an aspiring heavy-metal singer and guitarist, says the drugs get in the way of his creativity and gives a bottle of them to Ava to help her concentrate on her studies. He warns her not to abuse them, but Ava is a typical teen (especially a typical teen in a Lifetime movie) and not only starts popping the pills herself but giving them away – and Madison spots her doing this, threatens to “out” her as a drug user (which, among other things, could get her kicked off the track team and blow her chance at a college scholarship) and demands some of the pills for herself. Madison runs with a “fast” crowd that includes Xavier Morales (Nico De Castris), son of Senator José Morales and Madison’s sort-of boyfriend; Wesley, a Black student who’s Madison’s dance partner in high-school competitions (dancing is the one physical endeavor Madison is actually good at, though her mother Caroline denounces it as a “hobby” and a waste of time); and Casey Lang, a girl Ava has been tutoring and who has her own supply of Dexedrine which Ava turns to when her brother’s stash runs out. Having access to pills has reunited Ava and Madison – apparently Ava, so smart in other aspects of her life, doesn’t realize Madison is using her – and the four of them have a wild party at the Morales home one weekend when Leslie is working and the Moraleses are at a political fundraiser.

The party features a lot of underage drinking as well as pill-taking until Ava passes out and falls unconscious on the floor of one of the upstairs bedrooms. Casey leaves and threatens to report them to the police, but Madison has other ideas: she gets into her SUV and determines to run Casey down and kill her so she can’t turn them in for having caused Ava’s overdose, and as she did all those years before in junior high school Madison frames Ava for the crime by stealing her cell phone and leaving it at the scene. The police, led by Detective Parsons (no first name given), a Black official who is resentful when anyone calls him an “officer” (“I’m not an officer, I’m a detective,” he says, obviously taking great pride in having been promoted from a uniform into plain clothes), find Casey’s body and take her to the hospital, where she spends several days “out of it” and unable to be questioned about what happened to her and who might have been responsible. Leslie James decides to take it on herself to investigate the situation and see if she can find her missing daughter. After Leslie visits the Morales home and Xavier tells her Ava wasn’t at the party, Leslie watches a social-media video post from the party and her son Ryan (ya remember Ryan?) recognizes the sound of Ava’s laugh and tells his mom that his sister was indeed there.

Detective Parsons feels threatened by Leslie’s D.I.Y. investigation and threatens to arrest her for obstruction of justice if she keeps pursuing it and bird-dogging his leads. After several hours of unconsciousness, Ava comes to on the floor of the Morales home, and she tries to escape but Madison catches her and ties her up. Wesley, who seems to be the one member of Madison’s circle with an actual conscience, unties Ava and takes out his own phone to call the police, but Madison grabs the phone from out of his hands and throws it into the nearby swimming pool. (You didn’t think the Moraleses had a swimming pool? They’re affluent people in a Lifetime movie: of course they have a swimming pool!) In the end, Madison and Xavier decide to tie a stone to Ava’s leg with a rope and take her out to the same lake where her father died of his heart attack, but fortunately Leslie and Ryan are able to deduce this and arrive just in the nick of time, though Leslie has to do some perilous swimming underwater to untie the rope from Ava’s leg so she can rescue her.

The Price of Perfection is built from traditional Lifetime elements and situations – like the supposedly “perfect” daughter being tempted off the rails into the drug scene, the spoiled rich kid who thinks his dad’s money and social position can get him out of anything, and the official detective threatening the mom who just wants to get her missing daughter back unharmed – but it’s built unusually well. Despite some wrenching flashbacks – it’s not until an hour and a half into the movie that we finally learn what happened at the big party and how Casey got run over, and there are a few spots in which we’re not altogether sure just when are we – Grace’s script is a powerful reworking of traditional Lifetime formulae into something new and original, and Carrière’s direction matches the quality of the writing and gives Victoria Baldessara a chance to draw an effective character transition from malicious little bitch to out-and-out psycho. Grace gives the characters just enough hints of multidimensionality to keep them interesting, and though I haven’t been able to find an online source for the name of the actor who plays Wesley, he’s unusually good as a conscience-stricken kid whose mixed motives, including what’s pretty clearly an unrequited crush on Madison, come through strongly and beautifully in this fine young actor’s performance. I quite liked The Price of Perfection, and I suspect you’ll like it too: it’s available for viewing on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7K9V9vMY6tE.