The Man With My Husband's Face (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 two recent movies on Lifetime: the previous night’s “premiere,” The Man With My Husband’s Face, and last night’s “premiere,” Lies Beneath the Sea (made under the working titles Deadly Suspicion and Killer in the Cabin). The Man With My Husband’s Face was actually pretty good even though it started out as the old chestnut about the workaholic husband, Heath Grierson (Thomas Gipson, nice-looking if a bit on the nerdy side), and the irritated wife, Katrina (Koko Marshall, top-billed), who wants some social time with him but is frustrated at how many work meetings he has to take. Katrina has a job of her own writing pithy sayings for an Internet app, though she’s also at work on a novel about the 1940’s women’s baseball leagues. Heath is a free-lance realtor who’s involved with a major land development. One Saturday morning Katrina insists on taking them kayaking, only Heath at first begs off saying he has yet another meeting, then agrees to go but insists that they have to finish and be done by 2:30 p.m. so he can do his meeting. At the kayak rental place, Heath and Katrina has an argument and Heath tears off in a kayak without her. She follows but gets concerned when her ride ends and there’s no sign of him. She reports him as missing to the police, who send a rather hostile Black detective named Frank Brand (Benjamin David Dennis) who thinks Katrina is hallucinating. For the first half of the movie Katrina tries to convince this nasty cop that she’s actually seen her presumably dead husband out and about, and Brand is equally convinced that she’s just seeing things.

There’s also a side character named Crampton Ligotti, who’s either Katrina’s book agent, divorce attorney (she’d been contemplating leaving Heath at the start of the movie), or both. Ligotti, a grey-haired senior citizen, warns Katrina that there’s a loophole in her will she needs to come in and correct immediately: there’s no provision to protect her if she’s declared mentally incompetent. “Aha!” we think. “Another deposit in the Screenwriters’ Cliché Bank for later withdrawal.” Katrina also notices that she’s being stalked by a mystery woman, who presents herself as psychiatrist Dr. Prisca Giddings (Katie Page). She tells Katrina that [spoiler alert!] the man who’s moved back in with her who claims to be Heath is really Heath’s long-lost twin brother, Jacob Vance. Dr. Giddings explains that Heath and Jacob were both farmed out for adoption by different couples, and though they’re otherwise identical Jacob has a leaf tattoo on his right ankle. Because the family that adopted Heath was a good deal better off financially than the family that adopted Jacob, Jacob is determined to knock off Heath and take his place as a well-to-do realtor with a hot wife. Dr. Giddings tells Katrina to sneak a peek at “Heath’s” right ankle and see if she spots the tattoo. Only writer Taylor Warren Goff has another surprise up their sleeve (I wrote “their” because I’m not sure whether Goff is a man, a woman or something in between): it turns out [double spoiler alert!] that there is no long-lost twin. Instead Heath and his girlfriend, masseuse Ivy Kascmarek, concocted this plot by which the two would drive Katrina crazy and have her committed. This included Ivy posing as the nonexistent “Dr. Prisca Giddings” and the two of them staging a fake “therapy session,” of which they show a video recording to Katrina, in which “Jacob” reacts violently to the news that he has a twin and tips over the coffee table in her live/work space, storming out with a vow to kill the “twin” and take his place.

Their reason is that the company that developed the app Katrina writes for (ya remember the app?) is about to go public, which means that Katrina’s stock options, worthless at present, will be worth millions – and with Katrina declared incompetent and nothing to protect her in her will (since one of the two conspirators has conveniently dispatched Crampton Ligotti by breaking into his office and slicing his throat with a knife), Heath will have total control over all that money. Eventually the plot is foiled and Detective Brand finally catches on that Katrina is not crazy and she’s been the victim of a quite elaborate plot to make her seem so. The bad guys are arrested (in Ivy’s case) or killed (in Heath’s – or was it the other way around?) and Katrina goes on to collect the millions from her stock options and to publish her book, of which she presents an autographed copy to Detective Brand along with an announcement that her next novel will be a crime thriller, presumably based on her own life. Ironically given imdb.com’s usual obsession with avoiding “spoilers,” their cast list partially gives the plot away by listing Katie Page as playing both “Prisca” and “Ivy,” which makes one (at least it made me) suspicious that the presumably helpful “therapist” was really not as she seemed. The Man With My Husband’s Face – well directed by Danny J. Boyle (he’s not the similarly named Academy Award-winning director of Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting, but he’s quite capable and definitely a cut above most Lifetime directors, and he moves this film fast enough we don’t have the chance to linger over the plot improbabilities) from Goff’s intriguing, if hard to believe, script – is actually a better-than-average Lifetime movie, delivering the network’s usual “pussies in peril” formula with more than the usual aplomb.