Gaslit by My Husband: The Morgan Metzer Story (Allegheny Image Factory, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Alas, the second movie on Lifetime that night (Sunday, June 9) was quite a bit less interesting. It was called Gaslit by Her Husband: The Morgan Metzer Story – a title I found annoying because in the original Gaslight story, the heroine was also deliberately terrorized and made to question her sanity by her husband – and the central characters are Rodney Metzer (Austin Nichols) and his wife Morgan (Jana Kramer, top-billed). They have a reasonably successful and happy life together out in a pretty anonymous suburb until things spiral out of control when their son Kevin is produced from a particularly painful delivery and dies within a few days of a congenital heart condition. Morgan takes the loss of her baby to heart and then some, insisting on throwing him a birthday party every year and baking a ceremonial birthday cake, while Rodney not surprisingly thinks she’s over-reacting. Flash-forward eight years, and though Rodney’s and Morgan’s second attempt at reproduction has had considerably better results than their first – they’ve had fraternal twins, a boy and a girl – Rodney has lost a number of jobs and always blamed getting fired on others, including Morgan. He says he missed too many days off work caring for Morgan after Kevin’s death, and though he has a trust fund from his family’s money, the trust fund disappears after he decides to dispense with professional money managers and take over the fund himself. Both sink deeper into depression; Morgan is on an anti-anxiety (spelled “anti-anxiey” on her label for it) medication and also drinks wine throughout the day, while Rodney spends a small fortune on tools intending to start a handyman business and also starts jacking up on human growth hormone.

Rodney’s paranoia goes into hyper-drive when Morgan is cruised at her group therapy sessions by a man named Griffith Walker (Clark Moore) – who looks a good deal like Rodney, suggesting that this is Morgan’s “type” in men. Though Griffith gives Morgan his phone number only (ostensibly) to call for mutual support in connection with their grief processes, Rodney is convinced that Morgan is having an affair with him. Rodney sends e-mails, texts and even leaves a handwritten note in the Metzers’ mailbox ostensibly from Griffith, telling Morgan she could do better than Rodney and she should leave him already. Morgan naturally asks Griffith about these missives, and he insists he’s never sent them and, furthermore, “I haven’t hand-written a letter in 10 years!” There’s also a bizarre cut-in of a sequence in which Morgan is alone in bed when she’s menaced by a figure wearing a hockey-style mask, and we’re not sure whether this is a flashback, a flash-forward or a dream. Ultimately Morgan gets tired of Rodney’s rages, throws him out of the house and says she’s filing for divorce – one of the things that tipped her over the edge is a photo in a restaurant of Rodney playing golf in a local tournament on Valentine’s Day, a date Rodney said he had to fly to Texas for a potential job interview. Morgan has started her own interior design business and has recruited a long-time Black friend, Nicole (Abigail Esmena), as her assistant, so she now has enough money to support herself and the kids without Rodney. Morgan is still a good enough co-parent to allow Rodney regular visitation, and despite the separation Morgan agrees to let Rodney drive her back home alone while the kids are staying with an aunt.

Rodney tells Morgan he has pancreatic cancer and isn’t expected to live much longer – “Yeah, right,” we’re thinking about now – while the Black woman who leads Morgan’s therapy group (ya remember the therapy group?) has warned Morgan that Rodney is a narcissist and an egomaniac who blames others for everything that goes wrong with his life. (Gee, with a résumé like that he could become President at least once, and, increasingly likely, twice!) Rodney’s final revenge comes when he puts on the same sort of hockey mask we see in Morgan’s earlier flash-forward/dream sequence, breaks into her home, makes a show of rifling through her drawers looking for jewelry that isn’t there, and even rapes her. Then he injects her with a knockout drug, puts a pillowcase over her head, and drags her prone into the hallway and leaves her there to stew in her own humiliation. After that he shows up again in normal guise and pretends to “rescue” her, only she calls the cops and, while writer Benjamin Anderson doesn’t make it clear just how she recognized her assailant as her husband (I think it was the extreme close-ups of his eyes director Lee Gabiana gave us when he was ravishing her, when she presumably spotted the resemblance), ultimately he’s arrested and held to account for his actions. Maybe Gaslit by Her Husband wouldn’t have seemed so lame if Lifetime hadn’t shown it right after The Girl Locked Upstairs, but they did and it suffered big-time from the comparison and also from Lifetime’s title, which gave the whole plot away. I guess they were going for the engaging suspense of the original Gaslight in which we know throughout that the man who’s terrorizing the heroine and slowly driving her insane is her no-good rotter of a husband, while we root for her to figure it out, but Benjamin Anderson is no Patrick Hamilton and Lee Gabiana is no George Cukor!