The Life I Can't Remember (Hybrid, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Sunday, October 20) my husband Charles and I watched two movies on Lifetime: The Life I Can’t Remember and Little Girl in the Window. The Life I Can’t Remember, written by Robert Dean Klein from a story by Lifetime schlock-meisters Jeffrey Schenck and Peter Sullivan, and quite effectively directed by Amy Barrett (not the same one as the despicable woman who provided the sixth vote needed on the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade!), dealt with Emma Johnson (Morgan Bradley in a quiet, dignified performance), who’s run down by a car at night and ends up in a hospital emergency room with no memory of who she is, where she’s from or what happened to her. She’s met there by her husband, a psychiatrist named Dr. Dean Johnson (Gabriel Pranter), who signs her out of the hospital the next day. He takes her to their vacation home in the mountains, within walking distance of a small town, and from the moment the two actually entered the vacation home Charles was suspicious of him because the home looked totally un-lived in. I’d been suspicious of him even before that since I’d read the online synopsis on imdb.com – “Emma slowly gets her memories back from a suspicious night which put her in an amnesia-like state. She recuperates from the trauma with the help of her husband, a doctor, who's been more than helpful in making her feel comfortable again, but Emma remains in danger as she returns to a life she doesn't remember” – and realized I’d seen a similar Lifetime movie before in which the supposed “husband” was actually an imposter determined to take over the woman victim’s life for unscrupulous purposes. In that one the man who takes over the heroine’s life is a doctor who formed a crush on her when she came in as a patient, and among his sinister schemes was keeping her on a drug he told her was for her heart condition but was actually a narcotic designed to keep her from regaining her memory. In that one she finally regained her memories through having an accident and being treated by another doctor, who caught on to what the first doctor was doing to her by prescribing that so-called “heart medication” which was keeping her in an amnesiac state.

In The Life I Can’t Remember Emma is kept isolated by her (supposed) husband, though when he takes her to town on a date they’re accosted by a woman on the street and later by a bartender, Ryan (Theodore Martello, a quite hot young man; it’s a pity his role is so short!). Both immediately recognize Emma and have quite odd reactions to the man she’s in the company of: the woman is surprised to see her with someone she previously had an argument with and accused of stalking her, and Ryan gets killed by “Dr. Johnson” before he can tell Emma anything about what’s going on. Earlier Dr. Roberts (Patrick M. J. Finerty), the doctor who treated Emma in the emergency room, had given her a business card for a neurology specialist he wanted her to see, but her “husband” pocketed the card and never showed it to her. “Dr. Johnson” has two other people he’s paying to be his accomplices, Terrence (Andrew Steel), who’s posing as Dr. Johnson’s poker buddy; and Chloe (Melanie Au-Yeung), whom Terrence is paying to pretend to be his girlfriend. She becomes buddy-buddy with Emma and they exchange phone numbers, which Emma calls when she’s starting to get worried and restive about the isolation her supposed husband is imposing on her. An African-American woman police detective, Claire Wise (Tryphena Wade), starts a police investigation into the circumstances of Emma’s accident and takes into custody Gabe Taylor (Kenon Veno), who was driving the car that crashed into Emma and is scared shitless that Detective Wise is going to put him in jail. He reports that there was another person there at the scene of the accident watching it, and when Detective Wise shows Taylor a photo of Dr. Johnson, he identifies him as the man he saw that night.

Frustrated with a judge who won’t give her a search warrant, Detective Wise picks the lock of Dr. Johnson’s house and, totally illegally, looks around and sees, among other things, Emma’s wedding photo – and both she and we notice that the man in the picture as Emma’s groom is a totally different man from the one posing as her husband. (He’s even identified on the film’s imdb.com page as “Real Dean” and played by Tommy Primeau.) She continues to tour the house and notices the corpse of the real Dr. Johnson in the bathroom, and we learn through a flashback that the impostor clubbed him in the back of the head with a lamp, killed him and left him behind, which is why he wouldn’t take Emma back there but kept her isolated in the vacation home instead. The phony “Dr. Johnson” also kills Terrence when his accomplice demands $5,000 and won’t accept a lower sum. Also instrumental in tracking down the impostor is Seth Durant (Alex James), one of the real Dr. Johnson’s therapy patients, who shows up for his latest appointment, encounters a female colleague of his and is told he’s probably at his vacation home, only she won’t tell him where that is (“confidentiality,” you know). Undaunted, he steals a piece of the doctor’s mail that conveniently contains the address of the vacation home, goes there and does a double-take when he sees the man who’s posing as “Dr. Johnson” is someone he’s never seen before.

Ultimately it turns out that the phony Dr. Johnson is really a man named Chris whom Emma went on two dates with before she decided not to pursue the relationship any further because he seemed too domineering – but while she went on to marry the real Dr. Johnson, Chris became obsessed with her, murdered the real Dr. Johnson and bided his time until the accident occurred while he was chasing her and he could swoop in on her and tell her he was her husband. Messrs. Schenck, Sullivan and Klein filled their screenplay with Chekhov’s pistols, including a golf club (Emma can’t recall playing golf, but “Dr. Johnson” says he’ll teach her), Chris’s knife and Emma’s Krav Maga martial-arts training, which comes in handy when she and Chris are grappling with each other for control of the situation. There’s also a shovel outside on the back deck of the house which Emma grabs and uses to immobilize Chris and potentially kill him – though the writers and director Barrett leave it powerfully ambiguous as to whether or not he dies. We don’t see him dead and we don’t get a final shot of him locked in the back of a patrol car, arrested but alive, either. Nor do we actually see him escape. It seems like the filmmakers wanted to keep his fate open so either they could do a sequel (if this film is popular enough to merit one) or not.