The Woman with My Face (RNR Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Saturday, March 8) I watched a Lifetime movie from 2024 (one of the ones I suspect they premiered on their premium streaming channel, the Lifetime Movie Network, before they let it out on Lifetime itself) called The Woman with My Face. It’s a rather quirky tale about a young woman named Anya Wilson (Nicole Marie Johnson) who realizes in an unusual way that she has a previously unknown twin sister, Sarah Aubrey (also Nicole Marie Johnson). The way she finds this out is when Sarah’s husband, Joseph Aubrey (Donny Boaz, who’s easy enough on the eyes but not so drop-dead gorgeous we immediately assume based on Lifetime’s usual casting iconography that he’s a villain), walks up to Anya on the street and kisses her, then backs away after she responds in shock. When the two finally meet, they learn that they both have the same birthday and they were both adopted from the same agency in Bayfield, Georgia, where the film takes place. Anya already has a troubled relationship with her teenage daughter Mia (Abbie Minna Abrahams, billed only as “Minna”), who resents Mom’s career as a journalist and blames it for the breakup of Anya’s marriage to Mia’s dad. Directed by Brittany Goodwin from a script by Rosy Deacon, The Woman with My Face proceeds as Anya starts using her skills as an investigative reporter to find the facts about her own background. She receives several notes and texts warning her off the investigation, and also has to deal with a pushy local TV reporter, Harper Hayward (Brey Noelle), who seizes on the story as what could be The One to break her out of local TV news and earn her a shot on a national program. Anya is also harassed by Peter Boyce (Christofher Griffin), a heavy-set African-American who turns out to be yet another adoptee who was one of a pair of twins and has been frustratingly unable to locate his missing twin brother.

Along the way Anya also meets Willa Davison (Victoria Posey), who claims to be Sarah’s estranged adoptive mother. Sarah had told Anya that mom got the family into trouble with writing phony checks, but later it turns out that it was Sarah who got in dutch with the law when Harper uncovers her mug shot and threatens to publish it on the air unless Anya gives up her own investigation and agrees to an interview with Harper. This leads to an immediate falling-out between Anya and Sarah after Anya indignantly refuses to terminate her investigation just for the sake of keeping Sarah’s big secret a secret. Ultimately the villainess of the piece turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Willa Davison, who isn’t Sarah’s adoptive mother after all. Her real name is Linda Davrow, and she cooked up this whole scheme to study the effect on twins of being raised apart from each other. Though she published a book about this, and we see a copy in the Bayfield library where Sarah works (its cover is a painting of the familiar double-helix model of DNA, so we know the book has something to do with genetics), we’re never told just what Davrow’s research discovered or what’s so important about it she’s willing to resort, literally, to murder just to keep her secrets.​​ The person she murdered was Colleen (Carla Cloud), a retired social worker whom Anya tracked down; she had worked on some of the adoptions, and right when Anya was in her living room she got a call from somebody who ordered her not to talk, so Colleen had ordered Anya out of her house immediately, and then was found murdered when first Harper Hayward and then Anya went back to her house to make another run at getting her information. In a flashback, we see that Colleen died when Willa went to see her and spiked her tea with poison.

Ultimately Willa a.k.a. Linda Davrow overpowers Anya, kidnaps Mia, and locks Sarah in a garage and starts a car to kill her with carbon monoxide poisoning. Her price for allowing everyone to live is for Anya to delete all the research information she’s collected on the adoptions. Anya tells Willa that she can’t unlock her laptop without her hands being free, and when Willa does this, Anya wallops her with the laptop, temporarily incapacitating her. But Willa recovers and trains a gun on them, and it’s up to Mia to save her mom by sneaking behind Willa with a heavy glass vase, then knocking her out with it. Ultimately both families are reunited and Mia looks well on her way to getting a new dad, since Anya had along the way fallen for a hot young man, also a divorcé, named Leo Powell (Jonathan Ludwikowski). The Woman with My Face – not to be confused with a previous Lifetime movie, The Man with My Husband’s Face (2023), in which the villain poses as a nonexistent identical twin to drive his wife crazy and thereby grab her fortune – was a competent, workmanlike entry in the Lifetime “pussies in peril” genre (though this time the pussy was in peril from another pussy), no better than most of them but also no worse. At least it was engaging, and while the movie overall had the look and feel of something shot on digital video instead of film (and not too convincing digital video, at that), at least the digital technology probably made it a good deal easier for director Goodwin to show Nicole Marie Johnson as Anya and Nicole Marie Johnson as Sarah in the same frame.