How to Live Your Best Death (Synthetic Cinema International, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Curiously, the movie Lifetime showed right after Who Killed Our Father?, How to Live Your Best Death, was in some ways the virtual opposite – a tale with virtually no grey areas, in which the good people are all good, the bad people are all bad, and there’s no attempt either to keep us in suspense as to who the villain is or motivate them to create any real pathos – and yet the fun this time was precisely in the black-and-white nature of the story. It was basically a thrill ride through the mentoring-turned-deadly relationship between heroine Kristin Adams (Danielle Baez) and the sinister, domineering “life coach” she hires, Ashley Thomas (Alissa Filoramo). Kristin is an aspiring public-relations consultant at a firm called BeSpoke until she’s aced out of a promotion she deserved by a slimy male co-worker named Gus (Adam Fontana) who builds his contacts by playing lawn golf with the clients on the roof of BeSpoke’s headquarters. Kristin’s sister Sara (Saman Hasan, who looks enough like Danielle Baez they’re believable as blood relatives), suggests she hire a life coach, and after searching through the Internet and rejecting candidates who offer either help with her ascension to an astral plane or a successful struggle against her inner demons, Kristin lights on Ashley Thomas’s Web page and hires her without doing any other online checking (which becomes an important plot point later). We already know Ashley is a demented villainess because we’ve seen a prologue showing Ashley with a previous client (played by the film’s assistant costume designer, Molly Morgan) whom she killed when she didn’t live up to Ashley’s empyrean expectations, jamming her full of prescription medications to make the death look like suicide. (So both of Lifetime’s movies last night featured murderesses offing people by making it look like suicide via drugs.)

Once Ashley signs on as Kristin’s “life coach,” she takes over Kristin’s life with the thoroughgoing efficiency of a drill sergeant, setting rules about how she can drink, what she can eat, whom she can go out with and what sort of job she can have. On Ashley’s urging, Kristin quits BeSpoke and seeks out an interview with their principal local competitor, InterVision. Her interviewer, Bill Kelly (Al Pagano), is unimpressed and throws Kristin’s résumé in the trash, only Ashley spots it there and determines to blackmail Bill into hiring Kristin after all – which she does by cruising Bill in a bar, taking him to a hotel room, offering him a bondage session and then leaving him there after taking photos of them together and threatening to send them to his wife. (It’s never made clear by whoever the writers were – imdb.com lists Rachel Annette Helson as the director but doesn’t offer any script credits – just how Bill gets out or how he deals with the embarrassment of the predicament in which he’s let himself be lured.) Later Ashley follows Kristin and her sister Sara to a bar, where they cruise a hot, muscular young man – only Ashley overpowers him in the men’s room and threatens to beat him up, or even kill him, if he doesn’t leave immediately and stand Kristin up, which he does. Sara goes after Ashley and does an online search which reveals that she was previously a professional therapist until she lost her license after patients complained of her maniacally overbearing ways with them, following which she re-invented herself as a “life coach” and kept on doing pretty much the same thing. Later she bribes a lobby clerk in Ashley’s building (at first she comes on to the guy but he says laconically that 30 or even 20 years before that might have worked, but now he’ll let her in and risk losing his job only for a cash payment) to let her into Ashley’s apartment, where she finds a beloved old cup of Kristin’s, one of the items Ashley had decreed were “trash” and broken into Kristin’s apartment to dispose of. Alas, though Sara is Kristin’s sister and both women are white, Sara fulfills the role of The Heroine’s Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot But Gets Killed Before She Can Warn Her that’s usually a Black character; Ashley catches her in the apartment and strangles her with a red belt.

Ashley then turns up at a celebration of Kristin’s presentation having won InterVision a major new account, demanding credit for the victory, after she previously dispatched Kristin’s old rival Gus by overpowering him during one of his rooftop golf sessions, forcing him to sign a “suicide” note, and then pushing him off the roof. Bill Kelly is there and recognizes her immediately but is too embarrassed to say anything, and Kristin ushers Ashley out and determines to fire her. Ashley retaliates by taking surveillance photos of Kristin and her boyfriend from work, the racially ambiguous Kevin Stitt (Giovanni DeVal), smooching in a parking lot after a dinner date. She has prints made and sent anonymously to InterVision’s boss, Diane Vance (Gretchen Allison), and Diane calls Kristin into her office and gives her a dressing-down, saying it’s inappropriate for two co-workers in the same office to be having an affair. Ashley also ambushes Kevin and injects him with a powerful drug (we’ve already seen her prepare several hypodermics of the stuff and put them into a case so she’ll have them ready at the call) that renders him unconscious and comatose for about a week or so. It builds to a typical Lifetime climax in which Ashley gruesomely reveals to Kristin that she’s killed Sara through a photo board she’s made up of pics of Sara’s corpse. The two have a fight to the death in which Ashley tries both to stab Sara and inject her with the same drug she used on Kevin, but eventually Kristin jabs Ashley with the drug instead – though the finale is one of Lifetime’s annoying open-ended endings in which Ashley, in jail awaiting trial for Sara’s murder, rehearses her tired old I-can-build-you-up-into-anything spiel to use on the lawyer assigned to defend her. (One hopes the attorney will be a jaded old public defender who will tell her, “Lady, don’t bother.”)

Though it’s cut so closely to previous Lifetime formulae they might as well have called it The Perfect Life Coach, The Wrong Life Coach or The Life Coach She Met Online, How to Live Your Best Death is a lot more fun than most of these movies, partly due to the splendid visual power of Rachel Annette Helson’s almost Gothic direction and partly because of the full-blooded bad-girl performance of Alissa Filoramo as Ashley. What S. J. Perelman famously wrote of Erich von Stroheim applies just as well here: “Whatever von Stroheim’s shortcomings as an artist, he was consistent. When he set out to limn a louse, he put his back into it. He never palliated his villainy, never helped old ladies across the street to show that he was a sweet kid au fond or prated about his Oedipus complex like the Percy boys who portray heavies today (1952). I remember Grover Jones, a scenarist of long experience, once coaching me in Hollywood in the proper method of characterizing the menace in a horse opera. ‘The minute he pulls in on the Overland Stage,’ expounded Jones, ‘he should kick the nearest dog.’ Von Stroheim not only kicked the dog; he kicked the owner and the S.P.C.A. for good measure.” Obviously Alissa Filoramo had the same sheer joy in playing evil that Stroheim did; she’s a total amoral creep with utterly no redeeming values whatsoever, and though How to Live Your Best Death might have been a stronger work of art with a writer like Christine Conradt’s knack for giving her villains multidimensionality, it wouldn’t have been such a great showcase for Filoramo, who really becomes, to sex-change another famous line attached to Stroheim, the woman you love to hate.