The Replacement Daughter (Sunshine Films, Team Kentucky, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, April 28) my husband Charles and I watched two Lifetime movies in quick succession, The Replacement Daughter and Husband, Wife and Their Lover. The Replacement Daughter, directed by Bruno Hernández (though his credit here, as on most of his English-language films – he began his career in his native Argentina making Spanish-language TV-movies – omits the accent) from a quite good (if not without its Lifetime-typical loose ends) script by Michael Perronne, was actually quite good. Its central characters are Jessica Grady (Emily Miceli), a 17-year-old girl in her last year of high school who’s applied to Stelford University but is anxious about whether she’ll get accepted with enough financial aid to afford it; her (single) mom Lila (Kristi Murdock), who runs a beauty shop in a seedy part of town that for some reason has two names (either “Bourbon & Blush” or “Fantasy Nails,” depending on which direction Hernandez and his director of photography, Hernán Herrera, are pointing the camera); and one of Lila’s manicure clients, Eva Roberts (Stacy Hayduk, top-billed), a super-rich woman who’s always going on about her daughter Sarah, who’s supposedly touring Europe for two years attending various colleges. Eva shows up for a manicure and she and Lila become seemingly fast friends as they bond over Eva’s powder-blue nails, which Lila paints for her. Then Lila is struck by a hit-and-run driver on her way out after closing the shop one night, and shortly thereafter Lila’s friend and business partner Helen (K. J. Baker) is clubbed to death with a tire iron by a stranger in the obligatory black clothes of a Lifetime murderer. With Jessica still a few months short of the obligatory 18-year age by which she can live on her own, and Helen out of the picture permanently, Gretchen (Leah Harper), the county social worker assigned to Jessica’s case, insists that she move in with a foster family for the rest of her minority. Eva overhears this and announces that she’s already registered with the county as a foster parent and she will take Jessica in. Eva also says that, since her late husband was a Stelford alumnus, she can get Eva in as a legacy student and get her a full-ride scholarship from a fund her late husband endowed.

Unfortunately, this being a Lifetime movie, Eva’s generosity comes with big strings attached. It turns out her daughter Sarah isn’t gallivanting around Europe doing the academic equivalent of a Grand Tour. Instead she’s dead of cancer, and it slowly dawns on Jessica that she’s being groomed to be the titular “replacement daughter” for the late Sarah. Eventually both Jessica and we learn that Jessica is actually the dead Sarah’s half-sister; though Sarah’s adoption was supposed to be “closed,” meaning the adoptive parents (or the adoptee herself) were never supposed to learn who the birth parents were, Eva, with her nearly unlimited budget, was able to learn that Lila Grady had been Sarah’s birth mother. Eva set the whole thing up to be able to adopt Jessica legally – or, failing that, just to kidnap her and fly her out of the country on her private jet under a carefully created false identity. Her confederate is Tony (John French), a gardener who lives in a guest house on Eva’s estate with his son Shane (Sam Brooks) and who provides muscle for Eva’s schemes (it was he who murdered Helen and ran Lila down, putting her in a coma). At first I thought Tony was an ex-husband of Eva’s whom she was keeping locked up, à la Jane Eyre with the genders reversed, and Shane was her son by him, but no-o-o-o-o. Later we’re told that Eva couldn’t carry a pregnancy to term – she gave it four tries with her late husband and they all ended in miscarriages – which was why she had to adopt Sarah in the first place. Shane helps Jessica break into the secret room in the big house, which Shane has been told by Eva he’s not allowed to set foot in at all, and the two discovers Eva’s secrets, or at least some of them. Eva gets a delivery from another mystery man, a padded envelope that contains two phony passports in the names of “Deborah Rae” and “Katherine Rae” with Eva’s and Jessica’s photos on them. Eva’s plan is to sneak them out of the country on her private plane and ultimately settle somewhere that has no extradition treaty with the U.S., where the two will live out their lives as mother and (replacement) daughter.

Fortunately, her diabolical plans are broken up by Jessica’s best friend from school, Vanessa (Rachel Jensen), and by Shane. The two of them sneak into Eva’s mansion and free Jessica from the attic, in which Eva had imprisoned her and demanded she go along with Eva’s plan to relocate both of them out of the country. There’s one of those abysmal tag scenes beloved of Lifetime and its writers these days in which Eva, arrested by Black woman police detective Michelle Martin (Adama Abramson) and now in custody in a prison psychiatric hospital, starts cruising Dr. Wilson (Julia Clarke), the young woman psychiatrist assigned to treat her, and says, “You remind me of my late daughter.” I could only hope that Dr. Wilson had been briefed on Eva’s case and knew enough not to fall for Eva’s schemes. Nonetheless, despite the usual clichés, including Eva’s sinister housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers – oops, I meant Mrs. Durant (Janet Scott), though she does come off as if she went to the Judith Anderson School of Housekeeping – who’s been with Eva since her childhood but whom Eva knocks off three-quarters of the way through – The Replacement Daughter is actually a quite good movie, rich in Gothic atmosphere. Bruno Hernández shows a real flair for suspense, and Michael Perronne’s script has a few plot holes but nonetheless tells a rich, emotionally involving tale. One thing Perronne does right is that, like Christine Conradt (who I still think is Lifetime’s best writer ever), Perronne has enough skill at character-building to make Eva a figure of real pathos. She’s not a cardboard villain; she’s an unusual and initially sympathetic woman whose carefully constructed life got sidetracked when her beloved adoptive daughter Sarah died of cancer. We feel for her even though we loathe what she’s doing to Jessica and her mom, including at one point sending Tony to the hospital with insulin, intending to have him administer it to Lila so she would die and Eva would be in the clear. (The plot was discovered by Lila’s doctor, an African-American man named Dr. Lopez and played by Andrae Bicy.) Though there’s nothing great about it in absolute terms, The Replacement Daughter is a well-crafted entertainment and one Lifetime movie about which you don’t have to be embarrassed – and its makers proved it is possible to make a genuinely engrossing movie within the Lifetime formula and deliver the goods.