The Walls Are Watching (Fade to Black Films, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night I watched the usual Saturday double feature of Lifetime movies, which were dramatically different in quality even though they both followed the traditional Lifetime formulae. The first – and far superior – one was called The Walls Are Watching and deals with Theodore Souza (Branscombe Richmond), an engineer for 40 years until he was recently laid off, fell behind on his mortgage payments and lost his house to foreclosure. He goes ballistic when he hears the news and the official at the bank (J. P. Manoux) says there’s nothing he could do to save his house, and when the piss-ant bank clerk adds insult to injury and asks if Souza was a veteran, and Souza says yes, both he and we hope that there’s going to be some special program for veterans he can rely on to stay in his house. Instead the creepy clerk says, “Thank you for your service,” and sends him out. The house is bought by Mitch (Brandon Ford Green) and Erica (Lana McKissack), a young couple who’ve just been married tiree months and are tired of apartment living, especially since they’d like to have kids and the apartment they currently live in is nowhere nearly big enough to raise them. Mitch and Erica are also iinterracial – he’s Black, she’s white – and as I’ve noted before about other Lifetime movies featuring young interracial couples, no one makes a big deal about it and it’s just accepted as one of the facts of modern-day life. (I’m old enough to remember when that wasn’t true and people would go ballistic about straight couples of different races getting together, especially if they were planning to have children.)

Mitch and Erica buy Theodore’s old house at a foreclosure auction with no idea of what they’re getting themselves into, especially after Theodore stops by and surreptitiously plants bugs in the house to keep an eye on the new owners. Theodore has already committed murder; hels run down the auctioneer who sold Mitch and Erica the house, and he plants a piece of fabric from the auctioneer’s shirt and puts it on the front grille of Mitch’s car to make it look like he was the hit-and-run driver who struck and killed the guy. Theodore shows up at Mitch’s and Erica’s home and says he has a package of money from friends and relatives to buy back the house (which makes me wonder where these people were earlier in the process when their money actually could have spared Theodore the foreclosure and actually done him some good), but Erica refuses to sell and Mitch explains that with the additional closing costs and other charges they’d be on the hook for, they’d be losing quite a bit of money if they sold Theodore back the house. So Theodore – who’s already been besetting with quite a lot of grief in his life: his wife died from a long-standing illness five years earlier, he was laid off and his searches for other work have been fruitless, and his six-year-old son got cancer and died an excruciating death (and Theodore has kept a toy pickup truck he gave his son), goes over the edge and determines to destroy Mitch’s and Erica’s lives as thoroughly as he believes they destroyed his.

A police detective, Ivie (Anthony Starke), shows up at Mitch’s place and, dripping with hostility, accuses Mitch of killing the auctioneer even though the only thing he has in the way of evidence is the fabric on his car. Mitch is convinced he’s being set up but doesn’t know by whom. Meanwhile, Theodore has gone into the house, overpowered Erica and bound her in the basement with duct tape across her arms. Erica, who works out of her home as a psychotherapist, tries to use her professional skills to defuse the situation and talk Theodore down, but he is just too wounded to respond and he responds to her psychological entreaties with contempt. When Dan, a patient of Erica’s with obsessive-compulsive disorder, shows up for his therapy session while Theodore is still holding Erica hostage in the basement, Theodore overpowers him and kills him by putting his foot on Dan’s neck until he asphyxiates. (How Derek Chauvin and George Floyd!) Meanwhile, Ivie arrests Mitch and is taking him to the police station when both men hear a call on the police radio that gives Mitch’s and Erica’s address as the scene of an assault; Erica was able to call the police when she got free of her restraints before Theodore caught her and gagged her with duct tape over her mouth.

Immediately Mitch puts it all together and realizes that Theodore is the killer, that he’s the man who framed Mitch in the hit-and-run death of the auctioneer, and he pleads with Ivie to detour and go to Mitch’s and Erica’s house to interrupt the assault in progress. The film ends when Erica is able to grab Theodore’s gun and shoots him dead. The Walls Are Watching is an uncommonly good Lifetime movie, mainly because the writers, Brian Herzlinger (who also directed and gets a possessory credit, “A Brian Herzlinger Film,” a rare honor for a Lifetime movie) and Jay Black, are able to make Theodore an oddly sympathetic character. Though we certainly don’t approve of his actions, we at least understand him, and the writing and Branscombe Richmond’s performance as Theodore make him a figure of real pathos, a loser in life we feel genuinely sorry for even though his actions are repulsive. In one of the movie’s strongest scenes, Theodore tells Erica as he’s holding her captive, “I’m a good person” – and Erica fires back, “Good people don’t hold other people against their will, and good people don’t kill people!” Herzlinger and Black even manage to give the movie an ambiguous ending: at first Mitch and Erica are determined to resell the house on the ground that they never can be comfortable there, but then the two of them seemingly think better of it and hang a sign under the realty office’s sign saying, “Do not disturb occupants” – suggesting that Mitch and Erica are finally going to get started on making that baby which was why they wanted to buy a house in the first place.