One Night Stand Murder (Hybrid, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Unfortunately, after the relative quality of How She Caught a Killer, Lifetime’s second film last night, One Night Stand Murder, seemed even weaker than it would have otherwise. It was written by the usual Hybrid crew of Jeffrey Schenck, Peter Sullivan and Adam Rockoff – the first two doing the story and Rockoff the actual script – and directed, again quite effectively, by Brittany Underwood (once again, as so often in Lifetime movies, you have a woman director trying to bring humanity and verisimilitude to a script written by men!). The central character is Alyssa Morgan (Casey Waller), a young woman of indeterminate race who in the opening scene finds herself in a strange house in bed with a man, fabulously wealthy billionaire Fletcher Doyle, who’s been stabbed to death. Alyssa has no memory of where she is, how she got there or what transpired between her and Fletcher the night before, though she gets a clue from the address of a restaurant called Montparnasse where she and Fletcher had a dinner date before repairing to his place for whatever happened. She has a good friend, attorney Cynthia “Cindy” Warren (Alisha Ricardi), whom she confides in; Cindy tells Alyssa to go to the police, but Alyssa is too scared to do so. Cindy also agrees to take Alyssa’s case as her lawyer, saying that once Alyssa says the magic words – “I retain you as my attorney” – Cindy will be barred by attorney-client privilege from revealing anything Alyssa tells her to the cops. The next night an unknown assailant in black clothes – sweater, sweat pants and the obligatory hoodie many Lifetime crooks wear to conceal their gender – somehow breaks into Alyssa’s home, albeit without any signs of forced entry. Alyssa calls the police to report it but, without physical signs of a break-in, the cops refuse to do anything about it.

Then Alyssa gets a visit from Detective Keller (Alex Trumble), who’s so twitchy I guessed (wrongly) that he’d turn out to be the killer. He leads Alyssa to think he’s just there to investigate her reported intruder from the night before, but he’s really after her for Fletcher’s murder. She realizes this and bolts from her own house, taking refuge in the home of Roger Felding (Patrick Quinn), her former lover. Roger had previously been the husband of Cindy Warren, but they had broken up and Alyssa allowed herself to have an affair with him because she thought he and Cindy had definitively ended their relationship. Meanwhile, Fletcher’s widow Serena Doyle (Sami Nye) gives a TV interview in which she says that, even though they were legally separated at the time of Fletcher’s death, they’d planned to get back together and she mourned his passing big-time. She also says that they were both poor when they got together and she supported him as he built his success and became a billionaire. The TV host asks if they had a pre-nuptial agreement and she says they did, but it didn’t really matter. Gradually Alyssa realizes she’s being framed for Fletcher’s murder, and a waitress at Montparnasse restaurant tells her that Serena Doyle was in the restaurant the night Fletcher was killed and she got into an argument with him, though the waitress didn’t hear enough of what was said to know what the fight was about. Alyssa visits Cindy at Cindy’s home and, looking through an old photo album showing pictures of Cindy and Alyssa in happier times, spots a picture of Cindy and Serena Doyle together and realizes [spoiler alert!] Cindy is the one who framed her.

It turns out Cindy and Serena Doyle were sorority sisters back in their college days and they’d kept in touch ever since. When Serena decided she wanted to be rid of her husband, who was threatening to divorce her and invoke the pre-nup so she’d get only a fraction of what he was worth, the two arranged for him to meet Alyssa at the restaurant and take her home for the titular one-night stand. Serena agreed to frame Alyssa for the crime because of her own lingering bitterness over Alyssa’s affair with Roger, whom in the meantime Cindy has murdered by letting herself into Roger’s home while Alyssa was there, stalking and killing him by knocking him down a flight of stairs. Eventually Detective Keller and other Los Angeles police officers (the movie is set in and around Beverly Hills, and for some reason Alyssa’s home is every bit as lavish as Fletcher Doyle’s) arrive in time to save Alyssa from being knocked off by Cindy, and both Cindy and Serena are arrested. My husband Charles correctly guessed that Cindy Warren was the villainess behind framing Alyssa, though I don’t think even he realized that Cindy and Serena would turn out to be sorority sisters. One Night Stand Murder is a great title that deserved a better film – maybe about a woman who went home with a man she’d never met before and killed him in self-defense when he tried to rape her, then had to shield herself from the cops and establish that it was self-defense and therefore legally justifiable homicide. As it was, director Underwood and a generally capable cast did the best they could with an all too typically absurd Schenck-Sullivan-Rockoff script.