The Plot to Kill My Mother (Reel One Entertainment, Champlain Media, CME Spring Productoins, Lifetime, 20923)

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

The next Lifetime movie I watched January 22 was The Plot to Kill My Mother, directed by Simone Stock from a script by Lisa Joy, and this one was rather deceptively advertised in Lifetime’s promos. For some reason I had the impression that it would be about a young woman who grew up with her mother as a single parent, only to learn along the way that her mom was in the federal witness protection program,and when her former enemies in the underworld came after mom, the two of them would team up to find them and report them to the police. In fact, mom Teresa McLaughlin, nèe Teresa Russo, gets killed even before the first commercial, strangled by an unknown assailant who, like most Lifetime killers these days, wears a hoodie so we can’t tell what they look like or even whether they’re male or female. Mom got herself killed when she left the carefully constructed alternative identity the Federal Witness Protection Program had created for her in Ohio to visit her own mother back east, who’s terminally ill. Daughter Elena (Romy Weltman) immediately launches her own investigation, much to hte chagrin of her mom’s U.S. Marshal, Carter (Milton Barnes), who feels professionally embarrassed by Teresa’s death because until then he’d prided himself on never losing a protectee. Carter is a tall, strikingly handsome African-American and his scenes with Elena are so sexually charged I was hoping Lisa joy would have them become lovers, but she perhaps wisely didn’t go there and their relationship remains purely professional.

Carter follows Elena to her original home back East and watches as she moves in with her mom’s best friend from high school, Jacqueline, and finds out that four people – her mom Teresa, Jacqueline, Lorenzo Russo (who turns out to be Elena’s father) and another Italian-American man who from his photo looks like a gangster – all were involved in a car crash in high school. Elena gets a job in the mail room at Lorenzo’s real-estate development company because she’s convinced her dad had her mom murdered and she’s hoping to get the goods on him. While there she befriends a co-worker named Allie (Samantha Brown) whom she’s seen both at Lorenzo’s offices and at the hospital where Elena’s grandmother – whom she’s never met before – is a patient. Allie explains that she just took the job at Lorenzo’s to work her way through nursing school. Eventually we learn that the real killer is [spoiler alert!] Jacqueline, and when they were all in h igh school both Teresa and Jacqueline had affairs with Lorenzo and both gave birth to daughters by him. Only Jacqueline got upset because Lorenzo clearly preferred Teresa over her, and when Teresa testified against Lorenzo in a criminal trial Jacqueline gave herself points for having stayed loyal to him while Teresa ratted him out and testified against him. While in prison Lorenzo took stock of himself and emerged rehabilitated, but both Jacqueline and their daughter Allie (who’s also Elena’s half-sister) nursed a grudge against Teresa and, when she showed up to see her own mother and then was murdered, they decided to go after her daughter.

There’s a quite good chase scene in which Allie confronts Elena on a trestle and fires three shots at her, then gets away even though Carter had followed her there and shot her himself to protect Elena. In the end Jacqueline ends up dead – killed inadvertently by Elena when she shoves Jacqueline against a fireplace mantel, which fatally injures her – and Allie is arrested by the local police. There are some great scenes along the way, notably the “meet-and-greet” private meeting in Lorenzo’s office to which he subjects all his new hires – especially his young, comely female ones – and I couldn’t help but think Lorenzo made it a habit of hitting on the young women in his employ and we were going to get a kinky thrill out of watching him come on to his own daughter. Instead Elena blurts out the reason she’s there and her suspicions about him having ordered her mom’s murder, Naturally she has to escape as fast as she can, and that’s when Allie corners her on the trestle and tries to shoot her down. The Plot to Kill My Mother is supposedly “inspired by a true story” (though beware when Lifetime tells you one of their movies was merely “inspired by” a true story instead of “based on” it!), but whatever the true story was that “inspired” this film, in practice it became the usual Lifetime sludge, and it doesn’t help that Jacqueline’s characterization strains credulity. She’s yet another Lifetime villainess who seems perfectly composed until she just loses it at the end and starts doing beaver imitations on the scenery.