I Won't Let You Go (CME Summer Productions, Champlain Media, Lifetime, 2022)

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

The two Lifetime movies I watched afterwards were both engaging, though the first one was considerably better than the second. It was called I Won’t Let You Go and was directed by Meeshelle “Meesh” Neal from a script by Emily Golden (so both director and writer are women, a welcome trend in Lifetime movies even though the films made by women aren’t that much more sensitive than the ones made by men). It’s about a young woman named Angela West (Paniz Zade) who has been married for about a year to Keith West (Luke Humphrey, not exactly drop-dead gorgeous but still reasonably attractive). She’s eagerly expecting their first child and he’s seemingly supportive, but he keeps dropping hints of his deep-seated male chauvinism. Not only does he pout when she won’t join him in watching a football game on TV, at one point he insists that she get him a beer even though he’s perfectly capable of getting it himself. The film starts with her locked in a deserted mountain cabin (like so many other LIfetime writers, Emily Golden has the villain hide out the heroine in a deserted mountain cabin because it will be out of cell-phone range), and then the film flashes back to how Angela got into this mess.

She was a hot-shot at work and was planning a major fundraiser to feed homeless people, while Keith nags her about cutting back her hours and only working part-time – or even quitting altogether – so she can concentrate on having their baby and then raising it as a stay-at-home mom. Keith, who works at the same company as Angela and makes more money as a department head (though, aside from the fundraiser they’re putting on, we’re not sure just what the company does or how big it is), even goes behind Angela’s back and tells her immediate supervisor, Samantha (Amanda Cordner), that his wife wants to cut back her hours – only when she asks Angela if this is true, Angela tells her in no uncertain terms that it isn’t, that she loves her job and is justifiably proud of how good she is at it. For most of the film we’re led to believe that Angela is being stalked, both in person and by cyber, by her ex-boyfriend from college, Tyler Watson (Nck Name – “nickname,” get it? HIs real name is Nick Londoño, and his Wikipedia page says he’s based in Toronto but doesn’t say where or when he was born), who responded to her Facebook page advertising to the world that she was going to have a baby. She soon catches an intruder in her house and then starts receiving oddball gifts, including a bouquet of flowers, a teddy bear and a doll (the last after she’s already learned from an ultrasound that her baby will be a daughter but before she’s broadly announced that fact), all with cards signed “Tyler Watson.” The bouquet arrives on the night of Angela’s big fundraiser and Keith predictably gets jealous when he sees the name on the card that came with it,while Angela at first assumes her husband had sent it to her as an expression of support and love.

Angela and Keith see Layla McCoy (Patricia Goodman), a Black woman detective on the local police force in Minneapolis (and Brennan Clost as her police partner, Officer Lane, is by a considerable margin the sexiest guy in the film!) to complain about being stalked, and McCoy tells them that without more evidence there’s little they can do. She urges them to save any further e-mails and texts they get from Tyler, and when they arrive McCoy and Lane trace them. They find out that the real Tyler Watson actually stopped calling, texting or e-mailing Angela when, under the lash of Keith’s jealousy, she asked him to, and though he recently broke up with his wife Brenda (whom he says left him for a 250-pound hunky personal trainer) he’s been in Spain the whole time Angela has been stalked. Later McCoy runs a test on Angela’s texts and learns from the IP address that [spoiler alert!] it’s actually her husband Keith who’s been sending them, posing as Tyler and not only using that to buy the mountain cabin in which he’s imprisoned his wife but he’s told her the two of them will live off the grid there and she and the baby will grow up without any other human contact.

Fortunately McCoy is able to get there in time to save Angela from her husband’s madness and get her to a hospital just in time to have the baby in peace (though for a while I was expecting McCoy to become a D.I.Y. midwife and help Angela give birth then and there), and in the end Angela has the lavish home Keith lived in when this started with her daughter, whom she’s named Layla in honor of the cop who saved her life, while Keith has been arrested and cut a plea deal. This suggests that Lifetime is setting up a potential sequel in which Keith will get out of prison after a relatively short sentence and come back with revenge on his mind. As it stands, I Won’t Let You Go is a quite good movie by Lifetime’s standards, and writer Golden did a good enough job of setting up the late twist that it seems to fit the story and make sense based on what she’s told us these characters are like.