The Last Woman Who Lived Here (CME Spring Productions, Champlain Media, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, March 9) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called The Last Woman Who Lived Here. It began with a prologue in which a woman named Vanessa Miller is fleeing in terror from someone trying to abuse her. She lives in a large house – in later flashbacks it was established that she worked as a waitress at a local night spot, which had Charles briefly wondering how she could afford such a nice house on a waitress’s salary, though writer Leo McGuigan explained that by saying she’d lived there with her grandmother as grandma’s caregiver, and grandma willed her the house – and she gets a lot of frenzied knocks on her various doors. When she makes the mistake of opening one, her killer bursts in, drags her down a hallway, and … we don’t see what happened to her after that, but with the end of a paintbrush she chisels the word “MURDER” on the stairwell wall before she expires. Then there’s a typical Lifetime tag reading, “Four months later,” and four months later a new young couple, Joel (David Chinchilla – apparently that’s really his name) and Charlotte (Tamara Almeida) Wells, buy the house. Trudy, the realtor who sells it to them, tells Joel that there was a suspicious death in the house (though the police ruled it accidental) but doesn’t bother to tell Charlotte. Instead Joel gets a call while the two of them are alone in the house and she overhears him telling the mystery caller that he hasn’t told Charlotte yet.

Ultimately the Wellses get invited to a get-to-know-the-neighbors party hosted by Rick Bridges (Morgan Kelly) and his wife Serena (Cindy Sampson). Rick is the biggest of the big men in town, having just personally endowed a new children’s emergency room at the local hospital. He and Serena are the local power couple, while another couple, Ted (Randal Edwards) and Laurie (Heidi Lynch), are at the party. Laurie, the town gossip, breaks the news to Charlotte that they’re living in the “murder house,” and a furious Charlotte chews out realtor Trudy for not having given her that particular piece of information about the place. One of the reasons Joel, a personal-injury attorney, and Charlotte, a successful interior designer (when she mentions her latest customers, she says they’ve changed their minds so often about how they want their house to look that I joked she’d got Anton Bruckner as a client), wanted to move out of their “cozy” penthouse apartment into a home in the suburbs (the locale is Connecticut) was they wanted to have children. Rick and Serena also want children, but either Rick or Serena is infertile and so they’re planning to adopt so Rick can have a son to continue his family’s illustrious name and inheritance. On the night Vanessa Miller died, Ted’s surveillance camera on his front doorbell caught the arrival of a mystery assailant at her door, but Ted edited the footage before he turned it over to the cops.

Charlotte and Serena sneak into his house while he’s out one evening and get to see the whole recording, which Ted edited to conceal that he was having an affair and the video showed his partner Molly (Natalia Gracious) coming to his place that night. Ted arrives home unexpectedly with Molly in tow, and the two disappear into a back room in Ted’s house for some fun which gives Charlotte and Serena the chance to escape unseen. Later, just to prove that he has nothing to hide, Ted gives them a flash drive containing the unedited version of the video. There are also manila envelopes containing photos of Vanessa Miller with bruises inflicted on her by a mystery man just before she died, and eventually Charlotte sees a fancy watch on the wrist of Vanessa’s assailant in the photo and realizes [spoiler alert!] that it was Rick Bridges who attacked her. She gets ready to confront him about it, only he shows up at her place, overpowers her and takes her back to his home. Then he locks her in a wine cellar made of glass, with his vintages on display from his living room. Serena shows up and Charlotte is sure she’ll rescue her from her psychopathic husband, but [double spoiler alert!] Serena is not only in on her husband’s plot, it was she who killed Vanessa. Apparently Rick was constantly flirting with various young women in and around their country club, but for some reason he got more obsessed with Vanessa than anybody else. He was so determined to have her that he assaulted her and came close to out-and-out rape, then offered her money to keep the whole thing quiet.

Realizing that the scandal surrounding Rick’s attack on Vanessa would destroy their chances to adopt a child, Serena herself eliminated Vanessa and faked it to look like a household accident. Now she plans to kill Charlotte as well by clubbing her over the head with a singularly ugly statuette (had writer McGuigan seen Lady in the Death House?). Fortunately Joel has caught on to where his wife is and comes in to rescue her, and after a multi-character fight scene in which Serena and Charlotte both Reach for the Gun (did I tell you Serena had a gun just in case the proverbial blunt object wasn’t enough to take Charlotte out?), ultimately the police arrive and take both Rick and Serena into custody. Before that there’s been a powerful dialogue exchange between the principals that reminded me very much of the 1946 film The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, directed by Lewis Milestone from a script by Robert Rossen and starring Barbara Stanwyck as a fanatical woman, born to money, who’s determined to boost her milquetoast husband (Kirk Douglas in his first film) into a legal and political career about which he couldn’t care less. When Cindy Sampson as Serena declaims that behind every strong, powerful man is an even stronger, more powerful woman, and when she bitches to Morgan Kelly that he’s always making messes she has to clean up, one could (I could, anyway) readily imagine Stanwyck declaiming those lines. Capably directed by Samantha MacAdam, The Last Woman Who Lived Here was a quite good vest-pocket thriller that got better as it went along, and it ends in a tag scene set three years after the main action in which Charlotte, visibly pregnant with her and Joel’s first child, reads a newspaper story announcing that both Rick and Serena have finally run out of appeals and are due to begin serving their richly deserved sentences – even though the real world tells us that people at the social level of Rick and Serena Bridges almost never face the legal or social consequences of their crimes.