Husband, Father, Killer: The Alyssa Pladl Story (HFC Productions, Röhm Feifer Productions, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night’s (Saturday, October 19) Lifetime “premiere” movie was one of their better ones: Husband, Father, Killer: The Alyssa Pladl Story. It’s based on a true story: Alyssa (Jackie Cruz) met a scapegrace boyfriend named Steven Pladl (played as a teenager by Cale Ambrozic and a “mature” adult – quotes definitely intended – by Matthew MacCaull, and fortunately the two men look enough alike to be believable as the same person at different ages). She runs off and marries him when she’s just 15 years old – her parents try to warn her, but does she listen? No-o-o-o-o! – and he’s 21. Alas, he turns out to be a monster, repeatedly threatening to beat her (we presume he actually does beat her, though writer Stephen Tolkin and director Elisabeth Röhm, who’s parlayed a career as one of the assistant district attorneys on Law and Order in the mid-2000’s into a quite strong run as actress and director, don’t actually show him doing so). When they have a daughter, Denise, he locks her in a cooler so he doesn’t have to hear her cry. Alyssa insists that they put the daughter up for adoption and Steven agrees, hoping she’ll end up with a good and well-to-do family that can give her a better upbringing than they could. The daughter ends up with the Fuscos, who insist on renaming her Katie Fusco, but years later Steven is incensed when Katie shows up after having done a search for her birth parents and it turns out the Fuscos raised her in a mobile home and she had to share a room with her sister (presumably the Fuscos’ natural child).

The film’s title and a disclaimer both in the promos for it and the movie itself gave away that the story would be about incest, and I had assumed it would be that Katie Fusco (played as an 18-year-old by Matreya Scarrwener) would meet Steven Pladl without knowing he was her biological father and would start an affair with him in which he knew they were committing incest but she didn’t. Instead Katie – who’s already been established as a free spirit from the T-shirt she wears to her family reunion, “Raise Rebels, Not Sheep” – lets her dad seduce her even while knowing full well who he is. The scenes between them are beautifully done and Matthew MacCaull delivers one of the best villain performances in a Lifetime movie (and there’ve been quite a few good ones), a great portrait of controlled evil. Meanwhile, Alyssa has been trying to work up the courage to leave Steven and take their two younger daughters, Caroline and Jenna (the actress playing Caroline is regrettably unidentified on imdb.com but Jenna is played by Belle Furguson), with her – only Steven, despite his general irresponsibility (he can’t hold down a job longer than a few days and Alyssa is barely able to support the family on her earnings), keeps successfully guilt-tripping her into staying. Then Alyssa learns from one of her daughters’ journals (which Steven tricked her into reading) that Steven and Katie are having a sexual affair and Steven is the biological father of the child Katie is carrying. She reports him to the police, who show up in the person of a heavy-set African-American woman detective (one of the many Black authority figures who turn up in Lifetime movies as voices of reason). Alas, the Black woman police detective informs Alyssa that both Steven and Katie are legally adults (Katie had just turned 18 when she came to visit her birth parents) and therefore if they’re apprehended, both will be arrested and prosecuted.

Meanwhile, Alyssa starts dating again and ultimately ends up with a nice guy named Eric (Sebastien Roberts) who doesn’t seem to mind being gifted with an instant family of kids. Indeed, there’s an odd parallel between scenes in which Eric plays with Caroline and Jenna with a soap-bubble gun and earlier scenes in which Steven did the same thing, which were presented as examples of his irresponsibility because he’d let their water bill slide and so they got disconnected. (But if they had no water, how did Steven fill the soap-bubble gun with the liquid it needed to work?) As the movie wound on towards the end of its two-hour time slot, I wondered about the title Husband, Father, Killer and wondered just whom Steven was going to kill, since it wasn’t until 20 minutes before the end that Steven killed anybody. The person he killed was his daughter/wife Katie, who’d just pissed him off by announcing that she no longer felt comfortable with their relationship and was going to leave him. He tracked her down in his car, pulled up alongside her, and shot her through the car’s open window, then drove a bit further and used the same gun to kill himself. So Alyssa ends up with two remaining daughters and a wonderful man who’s the stepfather of her dreams, but with an empty hole where Katie used to be. There’s also a bizarre hole in that we never find out what happened to the son Steven and Katie had; before they got arrested for incest they’d had an argument in which Steven insisted that Katie not spoil him and turn him into a mama’s boy, but when they got arrested the child was turned over to Steven’s mother to raise and there’s no clue what happened to him after that. (I felt sorrier for him than for any other character.)

Though it was hardly on the level of Lifetime’s remarkable “premiere” from last week, The Girl Who Wasn’t Dead, Husband, Father, Killer: The Alyssa Pladl Story was quite good entertainment that showcased Stephen Tolkin’s skill as a writer and Elisabeth Röhm’s command of suspense direction. I wish Tolkin (who in the past has written many of the better Lifetime movies based more or less on true stories, including House of Chains, Cleveland Abduction, New York Prison Break: The Seduction of Joyce Mitchell, Conrad & Michelle: If Words Could Kill, The College Admissions Scandal and How to Murder Your Husband) had given us more insight into What Made Steven Pladl Run. It’s a common failing in his work – he’s great at scaring the shit out of us with his bad guy characters but not so great at explaining why they did what they did – and he also may have been handicapped by Steven’s suicide, though even there it’s hard to believe during the considerable amount of time that elapsed between his initial arrest and his suicide that he didn’t get interviewed by law enforcement or someone about the motives behind his incestuous affair. Was he seducing Katie to get back at her mom for leaving him? Was he trying to make her a substitute for mom (a reason given by many men who’ve had affairs with their daughters, especially when the moms have died and dad saw the daughter as her replacement)? Did he get off on the sickness and kinkiness of the situation? Or was he genuinely, albeit in a pretty twisted way, in love with her? I haven’t read that much about incest, but from what I have read about it I’ve got the impression that it frequently happens when the parties have been separated from each other for years and therefore haven’t grown up with the taboo against dating each other (the scenario of Wagner’s opera Die Walküre, in which a brother and sister who were separated for decades meet and immediately fall in love – or lust – with each other). The lack of an explanation of why Steven went after Katie and what attracted him to her (and her to him) leaves a dramatic hole at the center of what’s otherwise a quite compelling piece of entertainment.