My Child Has My Doctor's Face (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

After that Lifetime showed a movie I liked better, though my husband didn’t: My Child Has My Doctor’s Face, a title from which you could practically write it yourself. The film opens with a shot of a stuck-up, self-righteous medico – someone who epitomizes the old joke, “What do you call a person who thinks he’s God? A schizophrenic. What do you call a person who knows he’s God? A doctor” – named Dr. Prescott Bellamy (Daniel O’Reilly) filming a video. Dr. Bellamy heads a fertility clinic called Pure Cell to which hundreds of women patients have come for help having their husbands’ children – only Dr. Bellamy, who we’re told was one of the inventors of in vitro fertilization (IVF), which some anti-abortion zealots want to ban because it creates fertilized embryos and then disposes of the ones that aren’t implanted, hasn’t been using their husbands’ semen. Instead he’s been using his own, a course he apparently embarked on when his own normally conceived son was killed in an accident. (Initially we’re told that Dr. Bellamy’s late wife was also killed in the same accident, but later we see a shot of the boy being run over by a car without any trace of the wife.) He’s determined to breed a super-race from his own sperm, spreading it as widely as possible and recruiting mothers themselves smart enough to give his super-kids a decent education to make the most of the genetic bounty Dr. Bellamy has bestowed on them. Dr. Bellamy is making the video because he’s been diagnosed with a brain aneurysm that will either kill him in three months or deprive him of his intellect and turn him into a hopeless vegetable.

We then meet the couple who get enmeshed in Dr. Bellamy’s scheme: Jessica Graff (Natalie Polisson) and her husband Dylan (Jason Tobias). The two have just got married and they’re having an argument over her desiring a child while his sperm haven’t been strong enough to impregnate her. At one point Dylan even tells Jessica he’s willing to divorce her so she can marry someone who can get her pregnant, but she says no, he’s the only man with whom she wants to have a baby. They go to Dr. Bellamy’s clinic and scrape together whatever money they can find to afford his treatments, and the baby, a boy named Henry (Viron Sage Weaver) is duly born – only both Graffs notice that their kid doesn’t much resemble either of them. Later Jessica is stalked by a woman named Sarah Larson (Kelsey Fordham), whose son Emmett (Jax Binkert) strongly resembles Henry, just a year or two older. Sarah’s husband Connor (Justin Powell) has left her because he’s convinced she had extra-relational sex to get pregnant and he won’t hang around enough for her to tell him the truth – not that she quite knows it herself. (Later Dylan Graff briefly leaves Jessica because he’s had his own paternity test done, it determined that Henry was not his biological child, and he immediately jumped to the conclusion that Jessica had had extra-relational activity to fulfill her long-held desire for a kid.) Sarah is going after Dr. Bellamy and enlists Jessica’s aid in doing so.

Unable to see him in his office, they crash his latest appearance on a book tour (he’s writing a tome on the wonders of IVF), but he weasels out of taking their questions from the audience. So they hit on the idea of breaking into his house to grab samples of anything with his DNA on it: a toothbrush, a drinking glass, whatever. Jessica insists on doing the actual B&E herself and not only grabs the items but also steals a flash drive from Bellamy’s laptop containing his videotaped confession. Unfortunately, Dr. Bellamy has flown home from his book tour in Seattle because he dreaded being stuck there in winter, and there’s a nicely done suspense sequence over whether Jessica will be caught before she can make it out of there free and clear. In the end she delivers the evidence to Sarah but Bellamy sees them; they make a plan to take the evidence to the police the next morning, but Bellamy somehow gets word of it and knocks off Sarah with an overdose of Fentanyl he’s able to pass off as “accidental.” Later Bellamy kidnaps Dylan Groff and holds him in his basement, which also happens to have been his first consulting room, and he ties Dylan to his exam table and calls Jessica to explain his ransom terms. She’s to bring over all the evidence she has against him, and she’s to sign a paper giving control of her son Henry’s education to Dr. Bellamy and, after he passes, his estate because Bellamy has decided Dylan is too stupid to give Henry the kind of education he needs for his genetic gifts to shine. Fortunately, both Graffs are able to escape and call the police on her cell phone, which Bellamy stole from her but she recovered, and ultimately the Graffs are rescued and Bellamy is arrested and charged with 27 counts of “fertility fraud.” (The fact that he’s also committed murder – at least once that we know about, probably more – is discreetly unmentioned.)

I was hoping that his aneurysm would blow and that would be the deus ex machina that saved our nice young couple from his machinations, but no-o-o-o-o. There’s a reunion of sorts in that Henry and his older half-brother Emmett are shown playing together, and with Sarah’s death Connor is endorsing the friendship between their kids. Charles said he liked Secrets Between Sisters because it was a whodunit with a large suspect pool, while in My Child Has My Doctor’s Face we knew from the beginning who the villain was and what he was up to, but I liked this one better precisely for that reason. I remembered St. Alfred Hitchcock’s distaste for whodunits (he never made one after his fascinating 1930 British film Murder!) and his preference for letting the audience in on the truth right away and building suspense from what would happen when the characters learned what we’d known all along. Besides, it features one of the better Lifetime villains: as the mad doctor Daniel O’Reilly is magnificent, hitting just the right notes of self-righteousness and absolute conviction that his outrageous conduct is morally justified. If they ever do a biopic of Donald Trump’s years in the White House (both his first term and his second, should he win tomorrow’s election), O’Reilly would be quite good casting for it!