Hoax: The Kidnapping of Sherri Papini (Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie they showed after that, Hoax: The Kidnapping of Sherri Papini, was a much better movie, probably at least in part because it was based on a true story. In 2016 Sherri Papini, a married woman with two kids in Redding, California, disappeared for three weeks and claimed, when she later returned home, to have been kidnapped by three Latinas (though in the movie the number of her alleged kidnappers is cut to just two), who held her for heaven knows why. In fact she was shacking up with an old boyfriend, Chris (Josh Collins), who I thought had it all over her aggressively butch husband Keith (Matt Hamilton) in the male sexiness department. Hoax is a surprisingly sensitively written (by Katie Boland) and directed (by Marta Borowski) movie, with quite a few nicely done touches. First Sherri (a marvelously subtle performance by Jaime King) tells the public side of her marriage and family at her four-year-old daughter’s birthday party (though the child actress playing her looked more like eight to me). She says that Keith first kissed her in seventh grade and she fell in love with him instantly, even though they soon drifted apart and didn’t reconnect until they were adults. Then their daughter’s birthday party ends ignominiously when the balloon playhouse the Papinis rented for the occasion springs a leak and falls down, trapping the kids inside until Sherri dives in and rescues them. I don’t know whether this happened in real life, but it makes a great metaphor for the way the Pepinis’ life together is about to implode.

After the party breaks up we get a scene of Keith and Sherri having a major argument in their kitchen while they’re doing the dishes, and both complain about how little money they have. Each accuses the other of wasting money, and the conversation devolves further as Sherri suggests she go out and look for a job, while Keith insists that he can support his family just fine and no wife of his is going to work for wages. (Someone needs to tell Keith that this is the 21st century.) Keith tries to get a raise at his job, an unspecified gig at a big-box store called (if I heard the name on the soundtrack correctly) “OddMart,” but gets the usual times-are-tough brush-off from his boss. Then Sherri goes out one morning for her usual jog, only she never returns and Keith finds her phone and her earbuds by the side of the road on her usual route. He reports it to the police as a mysterious disappearance and organizes his friends to find her, including starting a GoFundMe page for her safe return. The police assigned to the case are Black woman detective Molly Rollins and her older, white male partner, Andy Bertain, neither of whom are listed on the film’s imdb.com page even though they’re both quite good, especially the woman.

Molly notices discrepancies in Sherri’s descriptions of the kidnappers – in one she said they were only a little larger than he was, while atterwards she says at least one of them was heavy-set – and this leads her to suspect that Sherri wasn’t kidnapped at all. Molly also tells Sherri and the audience that women almost never kidnap other women. Meanwhile, Sherri is getting restive with her hot-blond stud; maybe the idea of running off with her lover seemed thrilling at first, but the reality is they’re licing in a two-bedroom apartment instead of the house Sherri is used to and Chris won’t let her go out for fear she’ll be discovered and their secret will be revealed. Most of all, she misses her children and the regular local news footage of Keith and the kids making do without her impels her to fake an “escape” from her fake “kidnappers.” There’s a marvelously kinky scene in which Sherri orders Chris to brand her with the end of a golf club and kick rubber objects that look like hockey pucks at her so she’ll look like she was physically abused, beaten and branded by her kidnappers. Sherri returns home three weeks later and gets offers of interviews with TV talk shows, which Keith urges her to take because they could certainly use the money. Sherri says they could use the money they raised from the GoFundMe account instead.

Eventually Sherri’s scheme unravels when Chris’s cousin comes forward and says he saw her at Chris’s place, and Sherri’s ex-husband also comes forward with records from their divorce that indicate Sherri is a pathological liar and nothing she says is to be trusted. There’s also a political slant to the story, as Molly takes it as a personal affront that Sherri blamed her “kidnapping” on Latinos (thereby encouraging local bigots to target Latinos and beat them on the street), and Molly discovers a poem Sherri wrote and posted online a decade or so earlier that’s a typically stupid ode to white supremacy. )This part of the story reminded me of the Susan Smith case; in 1994 she murdered her children because she was dating her boss and he didn’t want kids around. She blamed the crime on a fictitious criminal and bolstered the credibility of her story by making him Black.)

Hoax: The Kidnapping of Sherri Papini is a quite well-done movie but it suffers from the Beyond a Reasonable Doubt problem – named after a 1956 film directed by Fritz Lang which starred Dana Andrews as a reporter who decides to frame himself for murder to show how easily an innocent person can be convicted and sentenced to death based solely on circumstantial evidence. Only producer Bert Friedlob insisted on a trick ending in which Andrews’ character actually did kill the victim, then worked out this elaborate scheme to escape being held accountable. Lang, as he recalled later, protested: “I cannot, I said, make an audience love Dana Andrews for an hour and thirty-eight minutes and then in the last two minutes reveal that he’s really a son-of-a-bitch and that the whole thing is just a joke.” Likewise, Hoax director Borowski and writer Boland do such a good job making Sherri Papini out to be a sympathetic, if screwed-up, character – including depicting her as genuinely in love with two men at once – that it’s a jolt when in the last act they have to paint her as a heartless bitch and liar who’s manipulated people all her life, including telling Chris that Keith has beating her (which he wasn’t) and telling Keith that her mom Loretta (Christina Sicoli) had beaten her as a kid (which she hadn’t).

We even feel sorry for her when Keith announces he’s divorcing her and taking the kids, since the kids were the reason she short-circuited the “kidnapping” plot and returned home. At least partly because it was based on a true story, Hoax turned out to be one of the better Lifetime movies – basing a film on reality, however much twisted and altered in the dramatization, seems to bring out the best in Lifetime’s filmmakers – and Sherri emerges as an oddly sympathetic character despite her manipulativeness and mendacity.