Her Affair to Die For (Almost Never Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2023)

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

This afternoon (Saturday, May 13) from 2 to 4 p.m. I watched a rerun of last week’s Lifetime “premiere,” Her Affair to Die For, which put a different “spin” on some of Lifetime’s hoariest clichés. Hot-shot attorney Noah Davis (Ryan Francis, who’s boyishly handsome – in fact, too boyishly handsome and too damned young to be believable as the father of a college student) is being considered for a major promotion to managing partner at his law firm. He’s so consumed with his job that he’s neglecting his wife Liz (Christina Maria Riccardi), who bakes cookies for sale from her own apartment and wants to open a bakery. For that she’ll need capital, and one reason Noah is so desperate for that promotion is that once he’ll be making the higher salary that will come from the new job, he will have enough money to supply his wife with the funding she needs. Noah’s and Liz’s college-age daughter Christina (Logan Mariner) has decided to move out of her parents’ home and get a place on her own, but she needs a roommate to cover half the rent and expenses. After interviewing several possibilities, including a nerdy, heavy-set young man who tells her he “cohabits” with several cats, Christina decides to move in with Alyssa Winters (Meghan Carrasquillo), a tall, strikingly attractive young woman with long blonde hair who shows up for the interview wearing skimpy cut-off denim shorts and a top that reveals a nice cleavage, something director Tamar Halpern (a woman, by the way), writer Erica Land and cinematographer Marcus Friedlander offer lots of nice, hot glimpses of for any straight guys who might be watching this.

The first day Alyssa and Christina are living together as roommates Christina gets a call from Noah saying he’s missing a file he needs for work, and she probably has it. Since Christina can’t get to her dad’s office in time and still make her class 20 minutes later, Alyssa volunteers to run the errand for her – and the moment Alyssa lays her eyes on Noah she’s immediately smitten and determined to break up Noah’s marriage and have him all to herself. Noah’s marriage is already under strain due to the immense amounts of time his job takes from him, and things reach a breaking point between him and Liz when Noah leaves Christina’s birthday party early to handle a crisis at the office. The two of them have a big argument which ends with Noah moving out and spending the night in a hotel, where Alyssa traces him, sees him getting drunk at the hotel bar, and ultimately seduces him. Alyssa has also learned that Noah’s assistant Patricia Burns (Duffy Hale) has a deathly allergy to peanuts, so she does the Münchhausen thing and has a peanut-filled Chinese meal delivered to Patricia at work, then “rescues” Patricia with an Epi-Pen she happens to have with her. It’s already been established that Alyssa is a volunteer nurse at the local hospital, so she knows her way around health care, and she’s more or less dating Dr. Craig Porter (Matthew William Winters), an African-American and best friend of Christina’s boyfriend, another Black guy and fellow student named Marcus Jackson (Jonathon Brown).

As if those intrigues aren’t enough, Noah’s hated rival at work, Peter Buchanan (David Lee Garver), gets the promotion Noah was hoping for thanks to a bit of information about the firm’s biggest client, a businessman whose (economic) partner is secretly the father of a son the client’s wife gave birth to after they had a brief affair. Alyssa hunts down Peter Buchanan and finds him at a bar, where she comes on to him – only it’s a trick: she really wants to borrow his cell phone to send a text to his boss saying he got the job under false pretenses (he bribed Dr. Craig Porter to get the info about the boy’s true parentage), and then she drugs her drink and lures him to follow her in his own car, and he dutifully loses control and crashes into a convenient tree, killing him. Alyssa’s plot unravels when Christina and Marcus are jogging in the local park and Christina sees Noah and Alyssa making out. Noah tries to reconcile with his wife but can’t bring himself to tell her about his extra-relational activity. Meanwhile Alyssa has given Noah a flash drive containing footage of Dr. Porter actually accepting Peter Buchanan’s bribe, and tells him to use it to get the promotion he thought he deserved and Peter did him out of, only to die in the car crash that everyone in the office is assuming was suicide.

Had Woody Allen been writing and directing this, it would have no doubt ended with Noah pairing up with Alyssa and Noah’s wife Liz ending up with Sam Harrison (Mike Boland), the man who offered to loan Liz the money to build her bake shop and for that reason Noah assumed Liz and Sam were having an affair. Instead this is a typical Lifetime movie with a typical Lifetime ending: it turns out Alyssa did this at least once before, in Texas (the film is set in Georgia – we know that because of one of the license plates we see on a car – no doubt to take advantage of Georgia’s generous tax credits for film projects made there), and Christina is able to use Alyssa’s old I.D. to trace her previous affair with a married man, a doctor at a hospital where she worked. The Texas doctor tells Christina that Alyssa – or Victoria Daniels, as she was known then – murdered his wife and is still wanted by Texas cops. She’s also wanted for a few murders in Georgia, including Peter Buchanan’s and also Dr. Porter’s (she killed him and stuffed his body in the trunk of her car). I admire Erica Land for her sheer skill at crowding this many intrigues into her plot, and also for holding off on making Alyssa too blatantly evil until her schemes unravel. In fact I liked the intriguing variation of making the male victim of the villainess’s obsession a man old enough to be her father. Otherwise, Her Affair to Die For is a slightly better-than-average Lifetime movie with a few variations to Lifetime’s familiar formulae, but not so many that it doesn’t deliver the goods Lifetime is famous for, including a “pussy in peril,” albeit from another pussy.