Breaking Girl Code (MarVista Entertainment, Dawn’s Light, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Sunday, April 23) at 8 I barely got home from St. P)aul’s church in time to watch the latest Lifetime “premiere” movie, Breaking Girl Code, which though it had its problems was a much better movie than the one from the night before, Her Fiancé’s Secret Life a.k.a. Falling for a Killer. Breaking Girl Code centers around Andi Quinn (Katelynn Bennett), a young African-American woman who has just moved to Boston after stints as an intern at two publishing houses in New York. Andi has just moved to Boston, where she’s never lived before and knows no one, because her boyfriend Sean (Johnny Ramey) is a rookie cop there. Alas, Sean’s schedule forces him to work mostly nights,so he and Andi have precious little time together. What’s more, when Andi finally gets a job interview with a publisher in Boston and the interviewer (Celeste Oliva) asks her why she left New York when she seemed to be doing well there, Andi tells her it was to be with a boyfriend. Wrong answer: the interviewer pints to a poster on the wall with a quote attributed to Gloria Steinem abut how every successful woman has done it on her own, and Andi gets the message that she’sn ot going to get the job. She also points out that Gloria Steinem never said the quote attributed to her. To make things even worse for her, just after she loses the job Seean tells her he wants them to stop seeing each other – it’s not rea;ly a break-up but Andi takes it as one,

She looks for companionship online and finds it in BeFriends, an app for single (or at least unmarried) women to meet for friendship and companionship. Her contact with the site is Farrah Priestly (Revell Carpenter), who gets her into an ultra-exclusive bar with her boyfriend Ethan St. Ignace (Ignacyo Matynia), a well-connected 1-percenter who tells Andi that he has a private networking group but it’s for men only. While at the exclusive bar Andi is hit on by one of Ethan’s friends, Jason (Luke Hamilton), and is so repulsed by the experience of being treated like a piece of meat that she bolts from the bar and goes home. Farrah somehow persuades Andi to give her group another chance, and Andi accepts – only to notice two of the other women in the group, Miranda (Ashlei Hazell) and Holly (Priyanka Arya Krishnan) get slipped a date-rape drug in their cocktails. Andi realizes that Farrah’;s group is jost pimping for Ethan’s: Ethan attracts young, attractive single women to go out with them, then his members slip them date-rape drugs and they wind up the next morning in strange rooms with visible evidence of having been gang-raped but no memory of what happened to them. Andi tries to get Miranda and Holly to report to the police while there’s still time to get them tested for drugs in their systems, but they decline. Just then Andi finally lands a job at a publishing company headquartered in the same building as Ethan’s, and while there she runs into Shannon (Danielle Baez), who says Ethan’s group is legendary among the staff in his office. She agrees to help Andi bust Ethan with the help of Andi’s ex-boyfriend Sean, but no sooner have they met in a presujmnably deserted stairwell in the building that a security camera Shannon thought was non-operational turns o tu to be working after all. Either Ethan himself or someone in his office overheard Andi talking to Shannon, cornered Shannon in the stairwell after Andi left,and pushed her down the stairs.

A similarly unknown assailant has also fatally run down Kayla Grayson (Aja Goes) after she showed up at the club to the disgust of one of the men in Ethan’s circle, who’d grown tired of her. Andi eventually tries to get Farrah, who’s in the Ghislaine Maxwell position – she’s a victim but also a predator and a pimp – only Ethan shows up and catches aAndi recording the meeting on her phone. Only he’s caught her too late: Sean has wired his phone to listen to Andi’s recording and is easily able to trace her ot the secret bar where Ethan and his friends are about to gang-rape her. Sean arrests Ethan and takes him away, and in an O.K. epilogue Andi leads a new meeting of the BeFriends women and invites Farrah despite the misiivings of the other members. Andi persuades them that Farrah was a victim herself and the other woman should forgive her and let her back into the sisterhood. Breaking Girl Code was directed by Kristin Fairweather, whose imdb.com biography describes her as “an award-winning independent filmmaker whose experience in politics, advocacy, and women's empowerment creates a unique lens for her critically-acclaimed work,” from a script by Suzanne Egan, whose writing reflects a similar sensibility. Though the characters are pretty stock and some of the coincidences verge n the risible – Andi just happens to get a job in Ethan’s building (I expected Ethan to turn out to be responsible for her employment and guilt-trip her into feeling she needed to protect him out of loyalty and gratitude) – Breaking Girl Code is aq quite good Lifetime movie and its sense of feminist empowerment and girl power is a welcome change from the “pussies in peril” sexism of so much of the Lifetime output!