Deadly Mom Retreat (Deadly Mom Pictures, Neshama Entertainment, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 20210

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

Alas, Lifetime pulled a scheduling trick by running two movies in a row with such strong polit similarities that the second movie detracted from the quality of the first. It was called Deadly Mom Retreat and I assumed it was made by the same team that made last weekend’s Deadly Yoga Retreat, director Brian Herzlinger and his co-writer, Robert Black – but I was wrong, Instead Deadly Mom Retreat was directed by Jane T. Higgins and written by Jessica Landry (continuing Lifetime’s current move towards giving more opportunities for women behind the scenes, even though not all the women directors they’re giving hands-up treatment to are as good as Christine Conradt or Vanessa Parise), and one of the plot devices it copies from I Won’t Let You Go is the one of the spurned lover from the central character’s college days who seeks a terrible revenge against the person they think took the outer person away from them. Both films also have major surprise twists at about the 90-minute mark. Deadly Mom Retreat starts out with heroine Junes (Lara Amersey) – that’s right, a woman named “Jules” – beset by an unwelcome visit from her ex-husband Tom (Jon Welch), who wants to get back together with her and hopes to facilitate that by refusing to sign their divorce papers.

Their daughter Rosalie (Sophie Cook) comes home from a visit with her dad and complains that Tom has a woman over named Claire whom he used to date in college, and who’s come back into his life now that he’s on the path, however halting, of divorcing Jules and becoming a free man again. Angela’s best friends Marissa (Christine Cox) and Karen (Tanya Clarke) invite her to come along to a singles’ retreat on the upcoming weekend and tries to hook her up with Zach (Chris Violette), who’s larger than Tom and has a baby-faced appeal, but Tom is more butch. When untoward things start happening to Jules at the retreat – first she collapses in the snow from what turns out to be a drugged drink, then her car’s tires are slashed so she can’t leave on her own, and then she’s deliberately fed a cupcake containing peanuts even though she’s deathly allergic to peanuts and someone swiped her EpiPen (if Anton Chekhov had lived in the era of EpiPens he would no doubt have said that if someone’s EpiPen gets stolen ini act one, they’re going to have an allergic attack and need one in act three).

At first we’re carefully led to believe that Joles’ tormentor is another guest at the resort, Georgia (Rebecca Lamarche), whose overall air of superiority makes it believable that she could turn out to be a Lifetime villainess. But when Jules calls her daughter Rosalie (ya remember her daughter Rosalie?) and asks if she has a photo of the mysterious “Claire” she can send her. When Rosalie does so, both Jules and the audience see that [spoiler alert!] it’s actually Marissa, not Georgia, who’s the mysterious “Claire.” Her motive in trying to kill Joles was that she was still in love with Tom (ya remember Tom?), who doesn’t look like a prize package anyway and certainly nt worthy of having two reasonably intelligent women fighting over him. But Marissa a.k.a. Claire has realized that Tom still has enough of a crush on Joles that he’s not going to divorce her, and therefore the only way she can eliminate the competition is to terminate Jules with extreme prejudice (the CIA’s euphemism for “kill”).

Only, fortunately for Our Heroine, Marissa does a lousy job of tying up Jules, and Jules is able to slip out of the absurdly inept bondage attempt and ultimately push Marissa out of a fortuitously open window to her death. Jules ends up with Zach and Tom agrees to divorce Jules and be a responsible divorced dad. There are some good aspects to Deadly Mom Retreat, notably the unstressed irony that neither Zach nor Junes have completed their divorces and therefore they’re still technically married to other people (an irony writer Jessica Landry could have made much more of than she did), but overall Deadly Mom Retreat is just a dull Lifetime formula piece, and it’s also an indication that what New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd called Lifetime’s “pussies in peril” formula generally (though there are exceptions) doesn’t work as well when the pussy is in peril from another pussy!