Lies My Sister Told Me (Robbins Entertainment, DARO Film Distribution, K5IVE Entertainment, Penalty Voc Productions, Lifetime, 2022)

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

LLast night at 8 I watched a LIfetime movie called Lies My Sister Told Me, about a best-selling romance novelist named Jennifer Ray (Nicole Marie Johnson) who, unbeknownst to her fan base or virtually anyone else, has an identical twin sister, Tracy (also Nicole Marie Johnson), who’s in a mental institution following a long-term nervous breakdown that started with bipolar disorder and soon devolved into full-blown psychosis. When Jennifer shows up at the institution for one of her periodic visits to her sister, Tracy overpowers her, injects her with an incapacitating drug (where did she get it?), and takes her place in the outside world, Charles and I both thought it was ridiculous that in the short amount of time that’s elapsed between Jennifer’s arrival and Tracy’s departure, Tracy was able not only to dress in Jennifer’s powder-blue dress suit and wear her gold-lamé stiletto shoes but even get her own tousled hair to look like Jennifer’s professional perm, while all the while dressing Jennifer in Tracy’s own institutional outfit. Once Tracy gets out and assumes Jennifer’s identity, the film, directed by Dylan Vox (which explains why one of the five, count ‘em, five production companies that made this is called “Penalty Vox”) from a script by David Chester, becomes a pretty typical impersonation story, as through most of the film we’re led to wonder just what will happen when the other people in the story realize that this is not the “Jennifer Ray” they know and at least presumably love. The other people in the story include Jennifer’s college-senior daughter Layla (Kate Edmonds), Layla’s boyfriend Rob (Dominick Ficco), Jennifer’s publisher Chad Poole (Jonathan Stoddard) with whom she’s been having a long-term affair even though he’s married, and her literary agent Karen (Scout Smith).

LThe only person who’s on to the truth is Peter (Emerson Niemchick), whom Jennifer blurted out the secret to one night in a bar in which she’s trying to pick him up – Jennifer’s husband Alex died 15 years ago and in the meantime she’s been involved with different non-serious flirtations and hook-ups with men. Only Peter is a blackmailer who has been extracting regular $5,000 payments from Jennifer to keep him from revealing her secret. When Tracy-as-Jennifer tries to palm off Peter with just $500 instead of the full $5,000, Peter gets angry and physically attacks her, and Tracy kills him with a screwdriver she had previously picked up to try to pick the lock of a locked room in her (Jennifer’s) house. Instead of doing the rational thing even for an irrational person, which would be to call the police and claim she killed him in self-defense after he tried to rape or assault her, Tracy hauls Peter’s body out in her own (or rather Jennifer’s) car and dumps his body in a convenient patch of ground. Tracy leaves quite a few clues that she’s not the real Jennifer, from giving Layla a wad of cash so she and Rob can go on vacation during the summer (the real Jennifer had refused this request) to announcing at a book signing that her latest novel will be about a mental hospital and will be totally different from anything she’s written before, then refusing to sign any books, claiming she’s injured her hand. Also, while Jennifer is ready and even eager to have sex with Chad Poole, Tracy turns him down and tells him to reconcile with his wife, whom he was planning to leave for Jennifer.

LThe person who ultimately stumbles onto the truth is Karen, who recalls a photo she’d seen of Jennifer with another woman who looked just like her, and though she’s white instead of Black she ends up fulfilling the Lifetime formula character of The Heroine’s Best Friend Who Catches On to the Villain’s Plot But Is Killed Before She Can Warn Her. The scene in which Tracy actually does in Karen turns into a bit of totally unintended humor, as Layla and Rob (ya remember Layla and Rob?) show up at Tracy’s (actually Jennifer’s, and looking so much like the exterior set of Foxworth Hall in Lifetime’s currently running mini-series Flowers in the Attic: The Origin I wondered if it actually was the same) home just after she’s clubbed Karen with one of Jennifer’s book awards and while Karen is still trying to get away with her life. For me, the best scenes in the film were the ones in the asylum, in which an increasingly desperate Jennifer tries to convince the doctors and nurses that she’s not Tracy and she’ not crazy – and everything she does just makes them more certain that she is crazy and hs going throughone of her periodic delusions that she’s her sister. Where I thought David Chester was taking us was to a denouement in which Tracy would confront Jennifer and get killed, and Jennifer would respond by writing a best-seller about her secret twin that would get her the best reviews of her career since her first book, Time After Time, which everyone regarded as her best work.

LInstead Chester throws us a real curveball in which [biug-time spoiler alert!] it’s revealed that it was actually Tracy who was Alex’s wife, Layla’s mother and the author of Time After Time, only Alex committed suicide and this drove Tracy off the deep end and into certifuable mental illmess. Jennifer kept writing romance novels to pay for the cost of Tracy’s care, but audiences could tell they were strictly formula pieces since Jennifer didn’t have Tracy’s gifts as a writer. (There’s a hint of this earlier on in which Chad Poole – ya remember Chad Poole? – demands to see the first 20 pages of the novel Tracy is writing about the mental institution, and when he reads them he proclaims them the best thing she’s written since Time After Time.) The film ends with a reconciliation between the sisters; in David Chester’s continuing effort to write six impossible things before breakfast, we’re supposed to regard this as a happy ending that blithely ignores the fact that we’ve seen Tracy kill two people. Until that weird curveball of an ending I had liked Lies My Sister Told Me (originally titled My Stolen Life, which evoked comparisons Lifetime and its producers probably didn’t want to make with the marvelous 1946 Bette Davis vehicle A Stolen Life) – it wasn’t a great Lifetime movie but at least it had its points – but that bizarre finish made me like it considerably less. Compared to this film, the surprise ending of the Jack Wrather/Monogram film The Guilty (1947) – also about a pair of identical twins played by the same actress – seemed a good deal more reasonable!