Who Killed Our Father? (NB Thrilling Films 6, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Saturday, May 27) my husband Charles and I watched back-to-back movies on Lifetime, Who Killed Our Father? (announced as a 2023 “premiere”) and How to Live Your Best Death, a rerun from 2022. Who Killed Our Father? was directed by Roxanne Boisvert from a script by Melissa Cassera, and turned out to be a well-constructed thriller with a genuinely surprising twist ending (more on that later). It begins with an alternation between Atlanta and Philadelphia, with the Atlanta part of the story headlined by Leila Moore (Kirsten Comerford). Leila responds to a call for help from her old foster sister Iris (Sofia Salituro), but by the time she arrives it’s too late: Iris has already been stabbed to death by a no-good live-in boyfriend, and the guy attacks Leila as well but she’s able to stab him to death with his own knife. Leila calls her own no-good live-in boyfriend, Brad (Mikael Conde), a gambling addict who’s run up a $50,000 debt to his bookie, and Brad tells her not to call the police but to leave the bodies of Iris and her no-good beau behind. The Philadelphia story involves a sullen teenage girl named Violet Hyatt (Devin Cecchetto) whose father, Scott Hyatt (Jeff Teravainen), was just clubbed to death in a local park where he was training for an upcoming marathon race. Scott pissed off Violet by almost immediately remarrying Nora (Joanne Boland) just months after the death of Violet’s biological mother, and the loss of her dad on top of her mom only amps up Violet’s bitterness.

What links the two women is that Scott Hyatt was the father of both of them; well before he’d met Violet’s mom he’d had an affair with a woman who, once they broke up, descended into drug addiction and ultimately died of an overdose. But before all that happened she gave birth to Scott’s daughter Leila, who was taken away from her mom when she was 10 and run through the foster-care system. The two women find out about each other through taking home DNA tests from a company that reports they both have familial matches they didn’t know about. Leila runs away to Philadelphia partly to get away from the bookies that are threatening to kill Brad – it’s dawned on her that the longer she stays with him, the more danger she’s in from his enemies – and partly to meet the sister she never knew she had. Leila and Violet form an uneasy partnership to find out who killed Scott, since the local police are stumped and don’t have any leads. Nora, who expects to inherit Scott’s thriving real-estate business, offers Leila a place to stay in the guest room. Later, while going through Scott’s old suits in the family closet trying to pick out which one he should be buried in, Violet finds a receipt for a necklace worth $8,000 from a high-end jeweler in town and is determined to figure out what the item is and who he bought it for. The first time Violet goes to the jeweler it’s “closed for inventory,” and the second time she goes she runs into a very haughty counterperson who tells her all their sales are “confidential.” Violet takes advantage of a conveniently timed phone call to sneak a peek at the store’s ledger, but the counterperson catches her and threatens to call the police. But before she’s caught Violet gets the information she wanted about what the item was, and later she recognizes it when she sees it on the corpse of Nora’s personal assistant, Hazel Carter (Konstantina Mantelos).

Hazel has been found dead in her apartment, victim of an apparent suicide – the cops assume that because what reads like a suicide note has been found on her phone – only Violet discovers one of the pills Hazel supposedly took, does an online search from the number on the pill, and later finds a bottle of the same medication inside a drawer in the guest room where Leila is staying. Until Hazel is found dead, writer Cassera has carefully built her up as a potential suspect, and my husband Charles was a bit ashamed for having fallen for the red herring and identified Hazel as the murderer until she herself died. There are plenty of other suspects around, including the one we never actually see but we’re told about: the man Hazel had been seeing until she dumped him to have the affair with Scott. There’s also Brad, who’s followed Leila from Atlanta to Philadelphia, and the mysterious bookies who are still after him for their $50,000 and threaten to kill not only Leila but Violet as well if they’re not paid. At one point someone flattens a tire on Leila’s car and then Brad comes along to help her change it (which reminded me of the 1920 Charlie Chaplin film The Kid, in which the titular kid, played by Jackie Coogan, throws rocks through store windows and then Chaplin, as an itinerant glazier, “happens” to come along and offer to fix them), and later on Leila is in a parking garage and has to duck after someone takes a shot at her. There’s also a subplot in which Nora offers Leila Hazel’s old job as her personal assistant, gives her a $5,000 cash advance – which Leila immediately gives to scapegrace Brad, who questions it because it’s only one-tenth of what he needs – and, since Leila has refused to steal her dad’s $50,000 watch for Brad to give to his bookies, Nora pays off the debt herself, or at least says she has.

It all resolves itself eventually when Scott’s business partner Peter (Frank Fiola) returns from Dubai to read Scott’s will – which turns out to have been changed a week before his death to disinherit Nora and leave his entire fortune to Violet. In a real surprise [spoiler alert!], Nora turns out to have been the killer; she set herself a seemingly unshakable alibi by saying she was at home the night of Scott’s murder watching a movie with her sister Faith Brewer (Angela Besharah), only just before the movie started Nora gave Faith a glass of wine spiked with a powerful drug that rendered her unconscious so Nora could borrow Faith’s car and drive out to the spot where Scott would be running so she could bash his head in with the proverbial blunt instrument. Leila and Violet discovered this from the security camera footage given them by neighbor Maya (JaNae Arnogan), yet another potential suspect since she was interested in Scott herself and hoped she’d be able to land him after his wife died until Nora beat her to the punch. Ultimately Nora is arrested (not killed) and Leila and Violet decide to move in together in Scott’s old house and take over his business. What I liked about Who Killed Our Father? is its relative understatement; there are no obvious scenery-chewing melodramatics and even the principal villain, Nora, is played as a matter-of-fact schemer rather than a demon from hell like so many previous Lifetime villainesses. I also liked the fact that Kirsten Comerford and Devin Cecchetto looked enough alike to be completely believable as sisters; in fact, they were close enough I could have believed them as full sisters instead of just half-sisters. It’s long been one of my pet peeves in movies to have actors who have virtually no physical resemblance to each other at all playing characters we’re told are biologically related!