Secret Society of Lies (Enlighten Content, Nasser Group, Coco Productions, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Secret Society of Lies – originally shot under the much blander title The Student (for once a Lifetime title change was actually an improvement!) – was worlds better. I had a feeling I’d like it from the imdb.com synopsis: “After being attacked at a party on her college campus, Chrissy [McCormack] (Kristen Vaganos), a brilliant, young woman suffering from anxiety, finds she must face her fears and expose her attacker. However, she quickly realizes he's part of a fraternity with deep ties to high-ranking officials that are willing to do whatever it takes to keep her quiet.” I always like stories about members of the 1 percent thinking they can get away literally with anything, especially because on Lifetime or Dick Wolf’s crime shows they generally get their ultimate comeuppance whereas in real life they don’t. (Brett Kavanaugh went from attempted rape when he was in college to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.) Secret Society of Lies starts with a prologue set in 1999 in which young spoiled-brat rich student Malcolm Martel (Giorgio Antoniazzi) drowns fellow student Alison Cho (Christina Sturgeon) in the swimming pool at Payton University in southern California, then without even drying off first hot-foots it to the dorm room of his girlfriend Nora McCormack (Julie Page) and immediately demands (and gets) sex with her. Alison’s case is written off as a “disappearance” and her body is never found, though she and Nora were good enough friends that they shared two necklaces with pendants shaped like half a heart.

The main part of the movie takes place in 2023 and Malcolm Martel (Justin Berti) is now the dean of Payton University and also faculty advisor to the Orion fraternity house. Nora (Kate Schletter) has arranged for her teenage daughter Chrissy to transfer to Payton even though Nora’s own career washed out there after Alison “disappeared” and Nora’s grades plummeted. Chrissy goes to a party at the Orion fraternity house and there she’s “roofied.” When she comes to she’s in the university’s student health clinic being looked after by a Black nurse and told she had alcohol poisoning – which she finds hard to believe because she doesn’t remember having that many drinks. She also learns from her mom Nora that someone drew three circles with dashes in between them on the back of her neck. This turns out to be a hazing ritual on the part of the Orions, and especially the secret sub-group within them called “Sons of Orion,” and it was also done to Alison Cho 24 years before even though her body was never found, so we know that but no one in the movie does. At a private meeting in Dean Martel’s office between him and two Sons of Orion members, Ryan (Ian S. Peterson) – Chrissy’s debate-team partner – and their token Black guy, Edwin (Keishawn Pinkston), Dean Martel not only chews Ryan out for letting some of the Sons of Orion’s secrets slip to Chrissy, he loses it completely and strangles Ryan to death. He and Edwin then take Ryan’s body to the school theatre and hang it from the ceiling beams to make it look like Ryan committed suicide.

Meanwhile, Chrissy has attracted the attentions of Dean Martel’s son Nathan (Luke Charles Stafford, a nice-looking young man with great pecs, even though Chrissy never yields to his advances beyond a brief, perfunctory attempt at a kiss, so we never get to see him topless and certainly don’t get the soft-core porn scene I was hoping for), the film’s most conflicted character. Through much of the story writers Adam Champ and Helen Marsh keep it ambiguous whether Nathan is part of his dad’s evil schemes or an innocent person getting dragged along by a corrupt father. My husband Charles noticed a clue that wasn’t developed in the Champ-Marsh script – when Chrissy is hiding from Dean Martel in the library after she’s broken into the campus security office to check out the security-camera footage of the theatre the night Ryan supposedly committed suicide there, she loses her phone and when she tells Nathan afterwards he says her phone was found in the library, something he’d have had no way of knowing unless his dad had told him. As things turn out, Nathan seems genuinely in love with Chrissy but also under orders from dad to destroy her, either by getting her to quit school or outright killing her. Secret Society of Lies has one thing in common with Secrets in the Desert – both are about villains who are also authority figures and therefore have a lot of power to cover up their crimes – but this movie does the theme a good deal better.

At one point Dean Martel boasts of the far-reaching power and influence of the Sons of Orion, saying the group has people in Hollywood, corporate boardrooms “and even the White House,” to emphasize the futility of resistance. When Chrissy’s friend, student journalist and blogger Sarah Kennedy (Azizi Donnelly), publishes a story about women students who’ve been assaulted by Sons of Orion members and shows photos of the three rings drawn on their necks, her faculty adviser threatens to close down the blog and Dean Martel calls her into his office for an official dressing-down and says he’ll expel her if she continues. When Chrissy, in the middle of a school debate over whether juvenile criminals should be prosecuted as adults, starts making veiled references to the Sons of Orion and their assaults on women students, suddenly the power is turned off in the school gym and the students and audience are escorted out in the “emergency.” And when Chrissy and Sarah contact a reporter from the local TV station, Channel 8, to do an interview about the Sons of Orion and what they’ve learned about them, Dean Martel strikes back by threatening to kill Sarah if she goes ahead with the interview and kidnapping Chrissy’s mother Nora to intimidate her into backing out of it. Eventually Dean Martel summons Chrissy to the school theatre, where he’s holding Nora and threatening to inject her with a toxic drug if Chrissy doesn’t kill herself with an overdose of her anti-anxiety medications. Dean Martel has even prepared a typewritten (or computer-generated, this being 2023) suicide note for Chrissy to sign, saying that she and Ryan were more than just debate partners and she’s so broken up over his suicide that she’s decided to do a copycat and end her own life. Only after Chrissy has taken just one of the pills, she knocks over the bottle and is able to overpower Dean Martel, who accidentally injects himself with the drug – he doesn’t die but is taken into custody at the end. So is Nathan, though Chrissy is convinced enough of his basic goodness that she asks the cop arresting him to treat him leniently. (One would think she’d know that’s not the arresting officer’s call.)

Effectively directed by Brian Skiba, Secret Society of Lies manages to be a quite gripping thriller with Kafka-esque overtones as Dean Martel’s power is so great and overwhelming writers Champ and Marsh really had to work overtime to figure out a way for Chrissy and the other good guys to overcome it. I also found myself wondering whether Champ and Marsh ever considered making Nathan and Chrissy half-siblings: we don’t hear anything about Chrissy’s dad and it seemed possible that we were intended to believe both are biological offspring of Dean Martel, especially since the young Nora was shown having sex with him and he could have impregnated her. It would certainly explain the skittishness with which Skiba, Champ and Marsh even approach any hint that Nathan and Chrissy are having sex with each other!