The two Lifetime movies I watched last night (April 1), Every Breath She Takes and Stalked by Her Past, both featured all or mostly Black casts – a curious trend in recent Lifetime productions – and Every Breath She Takes was quite good. It’s true that it didn’t really break new ground for the Lifetime formulae, but it was a quite well-done suspense tale with admixtures of Gothic horror. Directed quite effectively by Darin Scott from a well-constructed script by Jennifer Edwards and Amy Katherine Taylor, Every Breath She Takes centers around Jules Baker (Tamala Jones), who for the past few years has been in a terrible, abusive marriage to William “Billy” Moss (Brian White). The film opens with a montage of newspaper headlines announcing Billy Moss’s death in a house fire and also that he was a well-regarded and successful Black entrepreneur. The main part of the film takes place six months later. Jules is now a reasonably successful art teacher – art is one of the many interests Billy didn’t let her pursue when they were married – and among the students in her self-portraiture class is a young, hot, hunky Black engineer named Paul Jones (Lamon Archey). Paul is obviously interested in Jules sexually, or at least romantically, but Jules protests she isn’t ready to date again and she doesn’t think it would be appropriate to have an affair with a student.
Jules is beset by various other traumas; she insists that her dead husband is still alive. She comes home one evening to find the thermostat in her home has been turned down to 58 degrees – that’s where Billy liked it but she wants the house warmer than that – and she actually sees him stalking her. Her psychiatrist, Ryan Winslow (a really cute white guy named Tuc Watkins), tries to convince her that these are just grief-driven hallucinations and teaches her a breathing technique to help her relieve stress. Then he gets killed by a hit-and-run driver in the second act – just as I was beginning to wonder if he was part of a plot to drive her crazy, The Cat and the Canary-style, to grab Billy’s estate. Meanwhile, a very butch female police detective named Clarice Walker (Tisha Campbell) has become convinced that Jules actually murdered her husband Billy by deliberately setting fire to their home. Her suspicions lead Jules’s insurance company to stop payment in her claim just as she needs the money to remodel the home and fix all the fire damage. In one scene Detective Walker and her white male partner (who’s clearly playing “good cop” to Walker’s “bad cop”) show up unannounced at Jules’s home. After a rather testy interview during which Jules is understandably pissed that the detectives are accusing her of Bully’s murder, the detectives hear someone coming to her door, pull their guns – and hold them on Naomi, Jules’s rather air-headed white blonde neighbor. Once the cops have pulled guns on her neighbor, Jules orders them to leave. Jules’s best friend and financial advisor Dana Marks (Brooklyn Sudano) finds that Billy had been squirreling money into secret bank accounts and making withdrawals in Jules’s name even even after his supposed “death.” Dana discovers online evidence against Billy but, in the tradition of Lifetime movies featuring the heroine’s African-American best friend who discovers the villain’s plot but is killed before she can warn her, she duly gets taken out by Billy before she can reveal all.
Finally Billy confronts Jules and tells her that he murdered a homeless person to supply the authorities with a body that would be identified as him. His plan was to embezzle money from city contracts so he and Jules could flee the country and live a romantic life as fugitives from justice (presumably in a country with no extradition treaty with the U.S.). Billy comes to Jules’s house and confronts her, and though this is part of a trap she’s set to get the police to realize Billy is still alive and bust him, Billy surprises Paul, knocks him unconscious, and just when I was starting to suspect that Paul was in on Billy’s plot and was assigned to romance Jules as part of the scheme, the real co-conspirator turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Jules’s air-headed white blonde neighbor Naomi, who did it because she was in love with Billy and was hoping for the fugitive life with him – only Billy, once having used Naomi, couldn’t care less about her and shoots her dead. Jules is able to grab a rivet gun left over from one of the contractors working on her house and renders Billy really, most sincerely dead with a well-aimed shot to his forehead. (Can you really kill someone this way?) The movie ends with Jules acquitted of all charges, her insurance money resumed, and her hot new stud boyfriend Paul at her side as she exhibits one of her class’s art projects as a symbol of triumphing over adversity. Though Every Step She Takes doesn’t break new ground for a Lifetime movie, it delivers plenty of thrills and shocks, and it was a lot of fun.
