He Slid Into Her DM's (Cartel Pictures, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Sunday, September 29) my husband Charles and I watched two Lifetime movies in a row. The first was the previous night’s “premiere,” a film with the ridiculous title He Slid Into Her DM’s that turned out to be just as silly as you’d think from the title. It’s yet another take on one of Lifetime’s familiar tropes: the innocent young girl, Bernadette “Berni” Muller (Stella Gregg), beset by a mystery stalker she’s met online. Only because it’s 2024 instead of 2004 or 2014, Berni is a would-be “influencer” who’s trying to make a career out of plugging various commercial products online. It occurred to me early on that this is just an updated version of the radio programs Fred Allen and Tallulah Bankhead were spoofing in their marvelous “Breakfast Comedy” routine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vznctFrOUes), in which the names of their sponsors were included in the scripts and the distinction between entertainment and commercials became totally blurred. Berni has a with-it mother named Leah (Courtney Thorne-Smith, who also produced) who runs a beauty salon and is also effectively managing her daughter’s career. Berni also has a boyfriend named Zak Jacobs (Kane Parks), who’s African-American but not obstreperously so: he’s light-skinned and the only ways we can tell he’s Black are his nappy hair and his nose. As part of her “influencer” gig she gets direct messages from a mystery man who demands sexually explicit photos of her and offers to pay her $100 for a provocative but non-revealing pose and then more money for one in which she flashes her breasts.

I would have assumed that the suspense would be over just who the guy was – there’s an opening prologue which depicts Berni being menaced by an unseen assailant and calling 911 and then a typical Lifetime title, “One Week Earlier,” though the committee-written script (by Lydia Genner, Christina Kelly Holmes, and Erica Lane) brings back the prologue with more than half the movie still to go – and what would happen to Berni when he emerged from his online anonymity. Instead the writers and director Alicia Coppola (who, according to her imdb.com page, is no relation to those Coppolas) “out” the crazy stalker early on. He is Berni’s classmate Mason Michaels (Connor McRaith, who surprisingly given my usual fetish for hot young Black guys I actually found sexier than Kane Parks: he’s white and considerably more rugged-looking, and if he weren’t so crazy Berni leaving Zak for him would definitely be trading up), who grabs her arm after a basketball game in which his well-timed shots from the audience caused Zak to miss two crucial free throws. (Did I mention that Zak is a basketball player? He’s a Black high-school kid in a Lifetime movie; of course he plays basketball!) Mason is convinced that Berni is his “soulmate,” and when she doesn’t answer the handwritten letter he gave her during their post-game confrontation – the idea that he can actually write is itself something of a surprise given how resolutely young people either text or direct-message their friends on virtually everything – he shows up to her home (how did he find out her address? That becomes a significant plot point later on).

At first he’s carrying a bouquet, she accepts it but then asks him to leave. He does so, but he keeps hammering away at her door, and when she makes the mistake of opening it instead of calling the police then and there, he has a gun and holds it on both her and her mom. Somehow They Both Reach for the Gun (Maurine Dallas Watkins, your plagiarism attorney thanks you once again for your continuing business), and as Mason and Berni are wrestling for it, the gun slips out of both their hands, mom grabs it and shoots him dead. Then, for even more inexplicable reasons, mom Leah orders her daughter to lie to the police and to her online followers, saying that she had never met Mason before and had no idea who he was other than their interactions online. Leah even smashes Mason’s phone so police can’t recover the sexually compromising photos Berni sent Mason. Just why this is so important to Leah is never made clear, and when the truth comes out – courtesy of Berni’s supposed “friend” Hana (Siera Fujita), who sneaked into Berni’s room and recovered the handwritten letter Mason had given her and also filmed their post-game interaction and saved it for later use – it also turns out that Hana gave Mason Berni’s home address and phone number out of jealousy. Berni and Zak shoot a really charming scene in which he formally invites her to the school prom and she posts online, and the stunning video makes the prom judges crown them the king and queen of the event. But just that night Hana, along with Mason’s mother (Jessica Lanchester) – who’s convinced Berni murdered Mason in cold blood – drops her bomb, figuratively, showing Berni and Mason interacting in the school gym just after Zak’s big game and thereby blowing up Berni’s and Leah’s story that the two had never interacted face-to-face before.

Instantly Berni’s new-found status at school instantly collapses, Zak bails out of their relationship, New York University sends her an e-mail revoking their acceptance of her application (just why, when the story is established as taking place in L.A. – we know that because the Griffith Park Observatory is shown in an overhead tracking shot, and of course I thought, “At the top of movies featuring the Griffith Park Observatory is Rebel Without a Cause, and at the bottom is He Slid Into Her DM’s” – she’s insistent on going to a school in New York where her friends are going to UC Berkeley or Stanford), and her mom gets popped for obstruction of justice in destroying Mason’s phone. Berni fortunately gets off the hook herself by airing two more videos, one a mea culpa that apologizes to all the people who trusted her and one a live-streamed confrontation between her and Hana in which Hana admits she sic’ed Mason on Berni by giving him her home address and phone number. Eventually all ends up right with Berni’s and Leah’s worlds: New York University views her online mea culpa and decides to let her in after all, albeit on six months’ academic probation; when she gets there she decides to major in psychology; and Leah, after serving a brief sentence for obstruction of justice for having smashed Mason’s phone, opens a women’s resource center at the site of her old salon. Needless to say, Zak and Berni also get back together. He Slid Into Her DM’s – the verb “slid” is an unfortunate choice, since it makes Mason’s and Berni’s relationship a lot more sexual than it ever was – is as silly as you’d guess from the title, and it’s hard to feel sorry for two people whose suffering comes so much from their own mistakes, but director Coppola shows a real flair even though, like many other reasonably talented directors on Lifetime, she’s hamstrung by a mediocre script and actors who don’t always live up even to the limited demands of their roles (including Stella Gregg as Berni, who too often just seems a drip).