Secrets in the Desert (Hybrid, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Sunday, October 1) my husband Charles and I put on Lifetime for two movies, Secrets in the Desert and Secret Society of Lies. I had few hopes for Secrets in the Desert, described on imdb.com with the following synopsis: “While on a road trip through the desert, Charlie and her boyfriend Aiden's car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. Heading to a nearby town, Charlie suddenly finds herself on her own when her boyfriend goes missing,” but much greater hopes for Secret Society of Lies – and that’s about how it turned out. Secrets in the Desert is a Hybrid company production and the brainchild of Peter Sullivan, who directed it and also co-wrote it with Robert Dean Klein. Sullivan’s usual writing partner, Jeffrey Schenck, was involved but only as one of six credited producers, and as with so many Hybrid productions Secrets in the Desert is the work of a genuinely talented and visually imaginative director doing the best he can with a really silly and reality-challenged script. The central character is a woman named Charlie Campbell (Kayleigh Ruller), who as the film opens is driving from Houston, Texas to Eagle Lake, Arizona to attend the funeral of her recently deceased father, Edward Campbell (Preston Geer – and no, imdb.com doesn’t specify whether he’s any relation to Will). Though Edward is dead at the outset of our story, we see enough of him in flashbacks to Charlie’s childhood that Hybrid needed not only an actor to play him but also a child actress, Paisley Glazer (is that a person or a bolt of cloth?), to play the young Charlie. In the flashbacks, Edward was teaching Charlie to be a nature photographer and take pictures of deer and other wild animals without scaring them away, lessons that will come in handy when the titular secrets of the desert start threatening her.

The film starts with Charlie and her fiancé Aidan G. (Alex Trumble, whom Charles recognized from his previous Lifetime movies: he was the twitchy but ultimately honest cop in One Night Stand Murder and the title-character villain in The Wrong High School Sweetheart) driving through the Arizona desert in Aidan’s all-electric car. He insisted they drive that rather than Charlie’s gas-powered vehicle, only things go wrong when their batteries start running low. They stop at a combination restaurant and gas station in the town of Bottlebrush, only the garage’s charger doesn’t work. Midway between Bottlebrush and the next town over that might have a functional charger available, Aidan’s car totally runs out of power. Charlie is picked up by a very butch woman named Pamela Palmer (Cailin McDonald, who looked like the next person you’d call if you were a casting director and Frances McDormand was unavailable), who drives her to the Bottlebrush restaurant/café/gas station where she and Aidan previously and futilely tried to get their car recharged. She also calls someone with a portable charger and arranges for him to meet Aidan on his desert location and recharge his car, and promises Charlie that all this will take just an hour. Charlie grows more impatient as the hours go by, especially since not only is Aidan late but she has to fend off the rather clumsy advances of local boy Jake Wade (Nico Zahnizer). Then Pamela unsurprisingly turns out to be the villainess of the piece, clobbering Charlie in the head with a metal pipe. When she comes to, Charlie finds herself in a scuzzy living room tied to a chair, and Pamela and her son Owen (Emmanuel Jalbert), a local mechanic, tell her that they’re after $1.5 million in a trust fund Charlie’s dad Edward left her.

That might have been enough of a surprise twist for most writers, but not for Sullivan and Klein. In a dizzying and head-snapping set of reversals that suggest the writers worship at the shrine of St. Tony Gilroy, it’s revealed that [spoiler alert!] Pamela is actually the local sheriff. Charlie finds this out when she’s reporting her abduction to the local deputy, Graham (Christopher Sky), an African-American male. It’s not clear whether Graham is his first or last name (or maybe both), but Charlie learns that Pamela is the sheriff when she shows up in full uniform at the office where Charlie has been reporting her abduction to Graham. Charlie tries to steal Pamela’s car and finds her registration, which gives her Pamela’s address. She goes out there and sneaks in, only to overhear a conversation between Pamela and Aidan that reveals [double spoiler alert!] Aidan is in on the whole plot. He was working as an investment banker in Houston, only he lost quite a lot of money for his clients and was worried about going to prison for fraud. So he hit on the idea of hiring Pamela and Owen to fake a “kidnapping” of him so Charlie would transfer the $1.5 million to their account electronically and they’d split the money, which would give Aidan enough to make his clients whole and keep from going to jail. This at least explains how Pamela and Owen knew Charlie had that kind of money.

Eventually Charlie uses the woodcraft skills her dad taught her – the flashback sequences come so fast and heavily Edward Campbell practically becomes “dead dad ex machina” – and ultimately she crushes Aidan and Pamela under large auto parts, though they survive. Pamela is taken into custody by Detective Graham, who had no idea his boss was a crook for hire, while Aidan tries to escape but is shot, presumably fatally, by Pamela’s son Owen. In the finale, Graham offers Charlie a ride to Eagle Lake to her dad’s funeral, but Charlie says it’s one trip she needs to take alone, and after her ordeal in the desert she’s on her way to L.A. to take a job she’s been offered with a hot-shot law firm (an offer she got before her dad died but was reluctant to take because Aidan’s job was in Houston, but with Aidan out of the picture that’s no longer a problem). Secrets in the Desert has its moments, including a surprisingly Gothic scene of light beams emerging through the holes in a closed garage door and the transformation of Jake from annoying asshole to good guy at the end, but for the most part it’s typical Lifetime exploitation and not especially good typical Lifetime exploitation at that.