Amish Affair (Muse Entertainment Enterprises, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Sunday, July 7) I watched three new Lifetime movies in quick succession: the previous night’s “premiere,” Amish Affair, and two films scheduled back to back as last night’s “premieres,” Couples Retreat Murder (which is almost as bad a title as Armored Car Robbery, the 1950 RKO film gris – my term for a movie that attempts but does not achieve film noir – I’d watched the night before instead of Amish Affair) and Daddy’s Deadly Secret. Movies featuring the Amish – a long-term religious order/cult based in Pennsylvania who reject the implements of modern technology (they’re not allowed to drive, use phones or farm with modern tools, and they croak ahead of schedule fairly often because they’re not allowed to pasteurize their milk either) – have been a “thing” at least since the 1985 film Witness, a haunting movie in which Harrison Ford played a homicide detective who had to live among the Amish to find evidence in a murder case. (The gimmick was that the killer was a fellow cop who’d turned corrupt and the only witness was an eight-year-old Amish boy who’d seen the killing go down and whom Ford’s character had to keep alive.) Witness begat an intriguing TV-movie knockoff in 2004 called Plain Truth in which Mariska Hargitay, best known as Olivia Benson on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, played a defense attorney whose client is an Amish woman accused of killing her own baby. (It may have cast her as a defense lawyer instead of a cop, but she was still basically Olivia Benson.) This one was a major step down on the quality ladder from both those two whose main appeal seemed to be to explore the kinkiness of how normal sexual desires manifest themselves in a community so rigidly repressive.

Mackenzie Cardwell stars as Hannah Reid, a woman who was born into an Amish community but left to live among “the English” (Amish-speak for anyone non-Amish), trained as a nurse and even got a driver’s license. She later returned to Amish life but was driven out of one Amish community when the person she was supposed to be caring for, an elderly cancer patient, died and she was accused of euthanizing him. Somehow Hannah has been able to land a caregiver job at another Amish community, where Aaron Stutzman (Ryan McPartlin, who’s drop-dead gorgeous whenever the filmmakers, director Robin Hays and writer James Phillips, get him out of his Amish duds, which is often) needs a person with medical experience to care for his disabled wife Sarah (Dana Stoutenberg, who gives a quite remarkable performance as a woman consciously rejecting medical attention and trusting in God to determine her fate). Sarah has been diagnosed with ALS and Hannah keeps trying to get Aaron to get her some of the standard treatments (even though my understanding is ALS is incurable and the so-called “treatments” wouldn’t do her any good except reduce her pain). Breaking all the rules of Amishism, Aaron and Hannah start a sexual affair – and Robin Hays shows a lot more of them “in the flesh” than is usual for Lifetime’s soft-core porn scenes, including letting them get naked when we’re usually expected to believe that even people penetrating each other are doing so with their shorts on. Aaron wants Hannah to marry him whenever Sarah croaks, not only because he has the hots for her but because Sarah had only been able to bear him girls, daughters Rachel (Maemae Renfrew) and Grace (Evelyn Burke), and he wants a son to continue the family name.

There’s also another woman in Aaron’s life, Laura Miller (Gigi Neil), who’s the bookkeeper for Aaron’s buggy repair business (I’m not making that up, you know!) and who has an unrequited crush on him; and another male interested in Hannah (albeit completely licitly), Jacob (Sebastian Greaves, who’s cute instead of hunky but equally fun to look at). Jacob and Hannah go out on dates, where the Amish idea of a hot time is eating ice cream together, until a jealous Aaron leaks derogatory information about Hannah’s past to Jason and forces him to break off their budding relationship. Then Sarah finally dies, and the non-Amish cop who investigates the case, Sgt. Riley (Ese Atawo), gets a court order to exhume Sarah’s body and an autopsy reveals she died of rat poison. Both Hannah and Laura become suspects, though in the end [spoiler alert!] Aaron actually poisoned his wife after Hannah had insisted that they had to stop their affair and couldn’t be romantically or sexually involved “as long as you’re still married to Sarah.” Aaron briefly throws off suspicion by giving himself a sub-lethal dose of the same poison he used to kill Sarah, but in the end he turns out to be just another sexy Lifetime villain in an odder costume. In the end he tries to kill Hannah, whom he’s decided is an agent of Satan sent to corrupt him, with a pitchfork. He manages to wound Jason when Jason tries to intervene, but ultimately he’s taken out by another woman in the community (I can’t for the life of me remember who). Amish Affair is just another Lifetime movie with the schtick of being about the Amish and titillating us with the thought of all those nice, prim, proper people seething with unfulfilled lusts under those eccentric medieval clothes. (Weird Al Yankovic once did a parody song about the Amish that contained the great line, “We’re gonna party like it’s 1399.”)