My Sister's Double Life (Vortex Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, June 29) my husband Charles and I watched a surprisingly good Lifetime thriller, My Sister’s Double Life. Set in the fictitious town of “Westwood” (whose precise location remains a mystery: even the car license plates don’t name a U.S. state or Canadian province, so it’s unclear even on which side of the border it takes place; it was actually shot in London, Ontario), its central characters are journalist Chelsy Ellis (Sarah Grey) and her scapegrace sister Hayley (Amalia Williamson, top-billed). They had a long and contentious relationship while their father David was dying of cancer and they were his caregivers. It got even worse between them after dad’s death, when Hayley got addicted to cocaine and sold off most of David’s possessions to buy drugs. She even went into rehab, but then relapsed. When the film opens Hayley is working as a waitress at the Schoolhouse Restaurant and Bar (one wonders whether it’s called that because the building was formerly a schoolhouse) and fending off the sexual advances of the owner, Anthony Carmino (Rod Wilson) as well as various obnoxious customers. Since Hayley turned him down, Anthony turned his attentions to her co-worker Miranda (Watson Rose), and Anthony also makes both women work in ultra-short plaid skirts that make them look like hookers. The plot kicks off when Hayley is lured to a nearby wood and abducted by a mystery assailant wearing the typical Lifetime black hoodie. She’s held in a deserted cabin with flies crawling on her body. She’s also tied up and held on a bed, and her mystery kidnapper keeps force-feeding her drugs by injection.

Chelsy is understandably anxious to find her sister and bring her home, but things get complicated because she’s simultaneously dating a strapping young Black officer, Leo Torrance (Gabriel Davenport), and Leo’s superior, Sgt. Dore (Jorge Molina) orders him off the case because obviously he has a conflict of interest in that he’s dating the victim’s sister. Leo offers to investigate it privately on the Q.T. and report to Chelsy, who obtains Hayley’s old notebook in which she kept track of her various affairs, steals Hayley’s cell phone from the police evidence room, and later copies surveillance camera footage from the laptop in Anthony’s office. There’s a typical suspense scene for the modern era in which director Marta Borowski keeps us guessing whether Chelsy will be able to copy all the files before Anthony, who’s in the restaurant after hours, catches her. (Charles noticed a glitch in that after the copy is done, she just rips the flash drive she copied it to out of the computer without it flashing the usual “you didn’t eject your disc properly” error message.) Chelsy also finds a love letter, written to Hayley before her disappearance and printed so neatly I began to suspect it was from a woman and the attraction was a Lesbian one. At one point Sgt. Dore even has Chelsy arrested and charged with obstruction of justice, and the Tribune, the newspaper she works for, threatens to fire her after all the public attention she’s received.

After creating a nicely large-sized pool of potential suspects (one pet peeve of Charles’s about mystery stories is when the writer gives you so few suspects it’s all too easy to guess whodunit), writer Jessica Landry and director Borowski give us a reasonable and legitimately surprising finish. It seems that Hayley had a penchant for cruising married men in general and one married man, Tim Anderson (Cody Ray Thompson), in particular – though, out of fear that Hayley would reject him if he told her he was married, he’d lied and said he and his wife had separated. The gimmick turns out to be that in the course of their affair, Tim got Hayley pregnant, and Hayley’s kidnapper was determined to make sure she had her baby instead of getting an abortion. At first we’re led to believe that Tim was the kidnapper, but later it turns out that it was [spoiler alert!] Tim’s wife Sheryl (Anna Hopkins). After Tim and Sheryl had spent a lot of money and time on fertility treatments that didn’t take, once Tim got another woman pregnant Sheryl became obsessed with kidnapping Hayley and holding her until her baby was born, after which she would take the child and pass it off as hers and Tim’s. There’s the usual fight to the finish between Chelsy, Sheryl, Tim, and Hayley, who’s set free at the end by Chelsy only to fall victim to Sheryl again and literally have to fight for her life.

Earlier there’d been a telling exchange between the kidnapper and Chelsy in which they’d said, “I have to keep Hayley alive, but I don’t have to keep you alive.” Ultimately the police rescue both Chelsy and Hayley and arrest Sheryl and Tim, and there’s a “One Year Later” tag scene in which Hayley has graduated from some sort of medical training and she and Chelsy are raising the baby jointly. My Sister’s Double Life isn’t any great shakes as a movie, and it doesn’t tweak the Lifetime “pussies in peril” formula in any interesting ways, but it’s a quite competent, workmanlike thriller, and Sarah Grey gets some stunning closeups that reminded me of the young Mariska Hargitay on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and suggested that playing a woman cop may well be in her future.