Secrets Between Sisters (Storyteller Studios, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Sunday, November 3) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of unusually interesting Lifetime movies. The first was called Secrets Between Sisters and was directed by Linden Ashby (a male, best known as an actor for playing Wyatt Earp’s brother Morgan Earp in the 1994 Wyatt Earp movie starring Kevin Costner and directed and co-written by Lawrence Kasdan) from a script by Rib Hillis and Jessica Morgan. Set in Atlanta, Georgia (though nobody in the cast seems to speak with any hint of a Southern accent), Secrets Between Sisters centers around Cassie Wolcott (Jessica Morris) and her scapegrace siblings, sister Miranda (Brey Noelle) and brother Kevin (William McKinney). Miranda has fallen into an abusive relationship with Rufus Connor (the attractive hunk Michael Bonini), and when we first see her he’s just punched her in the face and she’s understandably fled him. She turns up on Cassie’s doorstep and Cassie announces that she’s going to stay with her for as long as she needs to until Rufus gets the message that she’s finally breaking up with him. Cassie has a husband, Steven (Daniel Stine), who’s an assistant district attorney in Atlanta. She also has an ex, Lyle (John Castle), who fathered her now-teenage daughter Ariel (Brianna Abruzzo), and Ariel is upset and acting out from her upset over losing her dad’s presence in her life. As for Kevin, he’s a compulsive gambling addict who’s in hock to the sorts of people you especially don’t want to owe money to, and he’s constantly begging his sisters for his share of the inheritance he’s owed from the recent death of their mother. Both Cassie and Miranda are determined not to give him the money because they’re afraid he’d just waste it on more gambling. Instead they’re using it as a pressure point to get him into rehab. Needless to say, Kevin is not happy about this and on two separate occasions he grabs Cassie’s wrist in anger.

A half-hour into this two-hour (less commercials) movie, Miranda disappears and is later found murdered outside an abandoned warehouse being used as a sex club. We actually get to see the murder (a strangulation) in progress, though Linden Ashby keeps Robert Vardaros’s camera far enough away that we don’t see whodunit. Charles gave this movie points for being a whodunit with a wide pool of suspects for Miranda’s murder: Rufus Connor, her abusive boyfriend; Kevin, her brother; Lyle, Cassie’s ex; and various hangers-on she might have met at that sex club (which is depicted in the rather sorry way that was common for 1930’s filmmakers to depict dens of iniquity: by making the demi-monde look so boring people would be discouraged from taking part in it). Acting against the solemn warnings from her husband Steven, who tells her the police are investigating Miranda’s murder just fine and her amateur crime-solving efforts would just get in their way, Cassie sneaks out of bed while her husband is sleeping, dons a leather coat and high heels, and heads for the sex club as soon as she’s found an online portal to register for their next party. Alas, the police raid the joint the very night she’s there, and she’s busted and held overnight until Steven bails her out. Cassie receives a text message from Rufus, whom the cops have decided was Miranda’s killer, saying he didn’t kill Miranda but knows who did and will tell her if she meets him in an hour. Any even moderately hardened Lifetime watcher will guess what happens next: Cassie goes to Rufus’s meeting place and finds him dead, fatally stabbed. Next Cassie makes arrangements to meet Rufus’s lawyer, Jeffrey Solerno (John Algeo), with equally dire results: Cassie finds him fatally stabbed in his office and has to flee from a standard-issue Lifetime hoodie-clad killer.

Also, Cassie discovers from the medical examiner handling Miranda’s case, Dr. Golding (Charles Christopher), that Miranda was pregnant when she was killed. Naturally she wants an autopsy done to find out who the father was, but the official police detective on the case, Andrews (Sharonne Lanier), shows Cassie a form, ostensibly signed by her, requesting that the autopsy results not be released. Eventually Cassie finds that no autopsy was done at all, so she and her friend Robin (Christie Leverette) – who seemed at the start to be destined to be The Heroine’s Black Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot But Is Killed Before She Can Warn Her, but is blessedly spared that fate and is alive at the end – are determined to get one done on the Q.T. by a pathologist at the hospital where Robin works. Ultimately the paternity test reveals that [spoiler alert!] Cassie’s husband Steven was Miranda’s, Rufus’s and Solerno’s killer. It seems he’d gone to the same sex club as Miranda and had had a hot-’n’-heavy quickie there, only because she was wearing a mask at first (a house rule, though at least as far as the male members were concerned honored as much in the breach as the observance) he didn’t know until afterwards that he’d just fucked his sister-in-law. What made it worse for him was that Miranda got pregnant from it and was determined to have the baby. The two argued about it and Steven lost his cool and strangled her on the spot, then killed the others to divert suspicion. Ultimately Steven is arrested after Cassie’s daughter Ariel saves her mom’s life by clubbing him over the head with a frying pan just as he’s about to shoot her. There’s an epilogue, “Three Months Later,” in which the surviving principals are One Big Happy Family again – Cassie, Ariel, Robin and Cassie’s ex Kyle, with whom it looks like she’s going to reconcile. Secrets Between Sisters was a slightly better-than-average Lifetime movie, with enough meat on the bones to give the director, writers and actors something solid with which to work; it didn’t break any new ground, though I’m a bit embarrassed that Charles guessed the ending well before I did!