He's Not Worth Dying For (Doomed Productions, Ltd., Lifetime, 2022)

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

Yesterday afternoon at 4 I watched a Lifetime movie that had had its “premiere” the night before: He’s Not Worth Dying For, a production that told the story of two young women – white would-be “influencer” Isla Masters (Rachel Boyd) and heavy-set but still attractive Black girl Grace Heinemann (Hilda Martin). The two young women start an online catfight over the dubious charms of Jake Carter (Lachlan Quarrnby, a young but quite attractive twink type whom we get to see in luscious soft-core porn scenes with both his girlfriends). Jake is from a military family and he’s returned to the town of Hayesville, Oregon (this is one Lifetime movie specifically set in a genuine location instead of just Anywhere, U.S.A., generally “played” by Anywhere, Canada) to live with his grandmother (actually he’s sleeping on her living-room couch) following his father’s death by suicide. At first we see Jake with Isla, then we see Jake with Grace, and then we see Grace with her parents (her mom is played by Robin Givens, the one actor in the film I’d heard of before). Because she’s so in love with Jake, Grace has decided – much to her strait-laced parents’ horror – that she wants to transfer from the exclusive private Marist high school tu Sheldon, the public school Jake attends. Grace has been on a solid track to go to college and study to become a veterinarian (though we oddly never see her in the same frame with an animal) and her parents are afraid her infatuation with Jake will disrupt her from her life plan.

For the first half-hour of the film Isla and Grace remain blissfully ignorant of each other’s role in Jake’s life, and Grace is sure he is the one while Isla is less committed but still ticked off big-time when she learns Jake is seeking the company of other women. One thing about the movie is writer Jacqueline Zambrano’s incorporation of social media in general, and Instagram in particular, into the plot. Not only is Isla’s career ambition to become an “influencer” – a bizarre new job category in which you’re paid to talk up other people’s products online – and she’s awaiting the goal of 10,000 online followers so she can sell herself to a sponsor, but the two women each learn about each other by posting each other’s hot videos of Jake having sex with them. At one point Isla gets her revenge against Jake by picking up another guy, filming them having sex, and posting it to her Instagram page with a “lots of fish in the sea” legend attached. We’ve also seen a prologue with Isla throwing out a previous boyfriend for having extra-relational activities with other women, so we know that despite her protestations she’s as jealous as Grace is. At one point Isla picks up a military knife Jake had left at her home – it was a leftover heirloom he inherited it from his late dad – and at a big party an hour and a half into the movie, Isla confronts Grace with the knife. She later insists she only intended to scare Grace into leaving Jake alone, but Isla gets so worked up she stabs Grace and Grace actually dies.

This was a real shocker for me because until then I had thought He’s Not Worth Dying For was going to be a black comedy. The ending I was expecting was the one from John O’Hara’s Pal Joey: the two women in the life of a scapegrace male protagonist decide they’d both be better off without him, abandon him and ultimately become friends. Instead, the last half-hour turns into wrenching drama, as Mr. and Mrs. Heinemann have to grieve the loss of their intelligent, attractive, promising and previously sensible daughter to a stupid fight over a man, and Robin Givens gets a rare chance to show her acting chops in a scene at Grace’s funeral. It’s an unusually rich film, ably written by Zambrano and capably directed by Kevin Fair, and it has a lot of fascinating touches. One of the school’s English teachers tries to make the literary works she has to teach relevant to her students by having them do fake Instagram pages for Romeo, Juliet, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Indeed, one of the aspects of the movie that especially fascinated me is its dramatization of just how important social media sites have become to modern=day young people, to the point where their lives blu9r the distisiinction between online and offline “reality,” and also the old Rebel Without a Cause-style theme of the gap between how young people perceive the world and their traumas and how older people try to tell them they’re overreacting to them and the things that seem so important to them now will fade away in time.

There’s also a real sense of tragedy even before Grace gets killed, in that we see both women risking everything they’ve worked for amd tried to become jeopardized over a man who isn’t worthy of either of them – and a sense of sadness in the end in that one of the women who fought over him is dead and the other is in prison for murder. Meanwhile, Jake gets away scot-free and unscathed both legally and socially for his role in the plot: he’s a star prosecution witness in Isla’s trial/ At one point relatively early on Zambrano has Jake say to Grace that Isla sees him as he is and Grace sees him for what he could be – and in some ways Jake is the most interesting character in the movie, desperately lonely and seeking for affection, and really too wounded to realize what effect his actions are having towards the people around him in general, and the two women he’s dating in particular. He’s Not Worth Dying For is the sort of movie I’m finding myself liking better as I reflect on it than I did when I was actually watching it (and though I’ll admit I understand what an asshole Lachlan Quarmby is playing I was also having the hots for him all movie!), unlike a lot of other Lifetime movies which when they end make me think, “Why the hell was I wasting my time on something this stupid?”