Lies Beneath the Sea (RNR Media, Almost Never Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (May 21) my husband Charles and I watched successive films on Lifetime, The Man With My Husband’s Face and Lies Beneath the Sea, and as so often happens with Lifetime the relative quality of the first film (it didn’t push the envelope of Lifetime’s formulae but did them better than usual, and I give director Danny J. Boyle a lot of credit for that) only made the second seem even worse. Also shot under the working titles Deadly Suspicion and Killer in the Cabin, Lies Beneath the Surface is not about a hunt for undersea treasure that may or may not actually exist, as the title they finally went with would seem to indicate. Instead it’s a tale about Hanna Nielsen (Lelia Symington), who runs a concession called Kayak Kountry in Clearwater, Florida. (At least this movie, unlike a lot of other Lifetime productions, is specific as to just where it takes place.) Hanna is still recovering from the long, slow, lingering death of her daughter from cancer – we get a few flashback glimpses of the poor daughter in a hospital bed with her head shaved and IV’s sticking out of her – and the resulting end of her marriage to her late daughter’s father, Tom Nielsen (Dean Deck). They’ve agreed to the terms of a divorce but Hanna hasn’t signed the papers yet, not out of any lingering hope of saving the marriage but just because she hasn’t got around to it, and Tom is pressuring her to sign them already because he has a new girlfriend (whom we never see) and wants to be free of Hanna so he can marry her. The moment Charles saw that this film centered around kayak rentals, just like the last one had, Charles inevitably joked about it – and I said, “Maybe the production companies got a package deal on kayaks.” (The two films were produced by the same companies: RNR Media, Almost Never Films, and distributor Reel One Entertainment.)

Actually, kayak rentals are far more central to this film than the last one (in which the kayak was just a convenient excuse to explain the male lead’s sudden and mysterious disappearance); Kayak Kountry is Hanna’s livelihood as well as her pride and joy. The plot begins in earnest when a woman, Kate Marks (Sara Malfara), and her daughter Sara (Alexa Carroll) show up and rent cabin 407, just across the pathway from Hanna’s cabin 406. At first they tell Hanna they’ve run away from an abusive husband back home in Texas (it’s not clear just where in Texas, though when the husband finally shows up in Clearwater we’re told he’s a law enforcement officer with something called the “SWPD,” which I had a lot of fun trying to figure out which Texas city that was). At first they seem like perfectly nice, rather skittish people on the run from a domestic abuser, but soon afterwards the husband, Jason Marks (Brad Worch II, who’s sexy enough we’re almost immediately aware he’s going to turn out to be a villain), invades their cabin. His presence, and that of his mother Alice (Rhonda Davis), immediately terrorizes Kate and Sara and nips in the bud a promising attraction between Sara and Hanna’s teenage assistant, Riley (Brett Cormier, easily the hottest guy in the film, just oozing twink-ish charm). Lies Beneath the Sea turns into an almost Gothic horror film, as we get glimpses of Jason terrorizing his wife and daughter and Alice – who comes off as the most monstrous mother-in-law since Endora, the one literally from hell Agnes Moorehead played so unforgettably in the 1960’s TV series Bewitched – intimidating Hanna and telling her not to be fooled by Kate’s innocent exterior.

The intimidation Alice and Jason aim at Hanna turns mean, as they first seek to sabotage Kayak Kountry with fake negative reviews online, then complain to the town authorities that Hanna is stalking them, and finally vandalize her entire stock of rental kayaks with black spray paint. The head of the local Chamber of Commerce calls Hanna in for a dressing-down and tells her not only that she can’t go around bad-mouthing the tourists that are the town’s livelihood, he pulls her business license so she can’t rent any more kayaks until he decides either to lift the ban or not. The only person who’s on Hanna’s side is a local cop named Officer Cooper (Michael Perl), who, in defiance of the usual Lifetime convention that hot, hunky guys are almost invariably villains, is Hanna’s former lover – a status they resume during the course of the film – and he talks a fellow cop out of arresting Hanna after Jason’s van window was smashed with an old kayaking trophy of Hanna’s. The trophy was stolen from Hanna’s cabin during a mysterious break-in at night for which we know either Alice or Jason Marks were responsible, but the cops still blame Hanna for the vandalism until Officer Cooper notices from the police photos that the broken glass from the window was outside the vehicle, not inside as it would have been if Hanna had committed the attack from outside. It ends, of course, with a final shoot-out in which Jason emerges from the shadows and hunts down Hanna and his own wife and daughter with a gun after he’s chained Kate and Sara to their beds with handcuffs. Alice accidentally shoots Jason with her own gun and the cops, now fully on Hanna’s side, arrest Jason and free Kate and Sara from his terrorism. Only they fail to find Alice’s body, and in a final shot that’s supposed to be chilling but is only yet another annoying Lifetime affectation, we see Alice inside a car, observing Kate and Sara with obviously sinister intent. Maybe this means a sequel is coming, maybe it doesn’t. After the relative quality of The Man With My Husband’s Face, Lies Beneath the Sea is a return to the slovenly form of so many Lifetime movies, and though José Montesinos is credited with both directing and editing it, he does only an O.K. job on both counts thanks to the ridiculous improbabilities of Matt Fitzsimons’ script.