Her Fiancé's Double Life, a.k.a. Falling for a Killer (13th Floor Productions, Liquid Arts Media, Venafro Capital, Lifetime, 2023)

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

The Lifetime movie my husband Charles and I watched last night (Saturday, april 22) at 8 was originally filmed as Falling for a Killer, but was eventually shown under the title My Fiancé’s Secret Life to fit it in with the cycle of movies they’ve made over the years about marital partners whose spouses are harboring some deep, dark secret. In this case the couple aren’t married yet – thank goodness – but are still having sex all over the place. She is Brea Young (Aubrey Reynolds, whom Charles recognized from a previous Lifetime movie, Vacation Home Rental), younger sister of assistant district attorney Darcy Young (Olivia Buckle, top-billed) – a first name that threw me for a while because the only other fictional character I know of named “Darcy” is one of the leads in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and he’s a man. The killer she’s fallen for is Thomas Schure (Jonathan Stoddard, whose very hunkiness, well showcased by director Lindsay Hartley and cinematographer Josh Maas, marks him as a villain in the Lifetime world), though he’s used several different names in the past: Thomas Baugh (the name he was using in a brutal prologue in which he shoves his new bride down an open elevator shaft to collect on the life insurance he’s just taken out on her) and Thomas Snow (the name he used when he murdered a previoius wife, also to collect life insurance on her). Darcy is actually the main character; she’s immediately suspicious of the new man in her sister’s life, especially since he claims to have no social media presence and her Google search of “Thomas Schure” reveals nothing.

Most of the fim takes place at the home of Darcy’s and Brea’s parents, criminal defense attorney Douglass Young (Mike Gassaway) and his wife Loretta (Langley Cornwell). One wonders what writer Jay Black (who’s also listed as an executive producer was thinking when he named his matriarch “Loretta Young,” the name of a quite famous actress from Hollywood’s classic era and the early days of TV (where she had her own show in which she made a grand entrance bursting through a door, and actually threatened to sue any other woman who began a TV show bursting through a door), but that’s not the least of his miscalculations. Black’s biggest mistake was to make Thomas’s villainy so obvious he might as well be a classic Western villain wearing black clothes and a black hat, and riding a black horse. Throughout the film Thomas periodically talks to himself, often in raging tones,and he understandably gets worried that the Youngs’ deaf-mute maid Kristina (Hadassah Patterson, who according to her imdb.com bio is part-Black and part-Native, though she looked just Black to me and I assumed she was going to be The Heroine’s Black Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot but Gets Killed Before She Can Warn Her), a skilled lip-reader, will be able to find him out by reading his lips during one of his soliloquies. Thomas does indeed try to kill her by injecting her with a poison drug, but she ends up in a hospital in a coma but survives. Thomas pretended to be helping save her, but he pinned down her arms so she couldn’t sign – a warning to Darcy (the only one of the Youngs who’s learned American sign language).

There’s an ongoing tension within the Young family because dad was grooming Darcy to join him in his defense firm, but she decided to join the D.A. 's office and become a prosecutor instead. There's also a duck-hunting trip on which dad and Thomas go out. There’s a third person on the trip, Earl (Jim O’Brien), who recognizes Thomas from an old case he worked on as a defense attorney, and from the moment I heard that I assumed Thomas would kill Earl and make it look like a hunting accident, but no-o-o–o-o, Black didn’t go there. Instead he had Thomas murder a cater waiter for calling him “dude” instead of “sir,” and spilling sauce over Thomas’s suit, then driving off in the man’s van and presumably crashing it somewhere to make it look like an accident. Eventually it turns out that [spoiler alert!] Thomas’s real last name is Halston and he’s the son of a particularly heinous criminal whom Darcy successfully prosecuted. Then Halston père was murdered in prison by a fellow inmate, and Halston fils decided to get his revenge by romancing female relatives of the judge in the case, the district attorney and Darcy herself, then killing them so the people who put his dad away would know first-hand the anguish of losing a beloved relative.

In the big confrontation scene at the end Thonas announces his intention to murder both Darcy and Brea – whom Darcy had futilely tried to warn about Thomas, and who finally realized that Darcy was right when a delivery man from an insurance company with the preposterous name “Heidelberg” arrived with a rush order on a policy Thomas had taken out on her and needed her to sign before he killed her – only the two women are saved by Douglass and Loretta, who show up as parents ex machina and blast away at Thomas with a shotgun. Thomas apparently survives, since the last we see of him is the police leading him away, but Black isn’t through with us yet. In an epilogie prefaced by a typical Lifetime chyron, “One Year Later," Darcy is in her office when a young man named Justin (Ali Zahin) shows up, claiming to be a new lawyer in her dad’s firm, and she immediately falls for him. Then Black tells us that Justin is really Thomas’s younger brother, out to continue Thomas’s revenge plot.

I’ve seen some pretty bad Lifetime movies over the years, but Her Fiancé’s Secret Life a.k.a. Falling for a Killer is easily one of the worst. The big problem is the villain: he’s too obviously a maniac and I can’t for the life of me understand how a family as intelligent as the Youngs are supposed to be are – with the exception of Darcy – so totally taken in by him. Jonathan Stoddard’s performance reminded me of Lawrence Tierney, a Hollywood actor from the late 1940’s and early 1950’s who shot to brief stardom as John Dillinger in 1945, once the Production Code Administration finally left their ban on portraying him on screen in 1945. (The ban kept us from seeing the actor who was born to play Dillinger, Humphrey Bogart – the two even looked astonishingly alike – in the role, though his star-making role was as the outlaw Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest, a character obviously based on Dillinger.) Unfortunately, Tierney was almost as much of a thug off-screen as he was on, so he didn’t have a long career, but Stoddard reminded me so much of him that if anyone wants to do a Lawrence Tierney biopic, Stoddard would be perfect casting for it. I also felt sorry for Lindsay Hartley, a woman who has worked her way up from beauty-contest winner at 14 to actress and now director. In addition to directing this film, she also appears in it in the brief role of Darcy’s immediate superior at the D.A.’s office, who runs a check on Thomas and finds out who he really is. She seems like a potentially capable director but she’s hamstrung here by the idiotic melodramatics of Jay Black’s script, and I can only hope she gets better writers in the future.