Pretty Hurts (Swirl Films, GDK, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Saturday, June 28) I watched the “Premiere” showing of a truly weird Lifetime TV-movie called Pretty Hurts, which unfortunately doesn’t have an imdb.com page yet. So I can’t pay tribute to the writer(s) or any of the cast members besides the three principals: high-school senior Lauren Burke (Sarah Borne), her mother Julie (Haylie Duff, Hilary Duff’s older sister and a major actress in her own right), and Lauren’s best friend Rae (Kaycie Barker). Rae is African-American, and since the average life expectancy of a Black best friend in a Lifetime movie is about that of a Spinal Tap drummer, we fear for her from the get-go. I was able to find the name of the director, Brian Herzlinger, from the moviedelic Web site. The film was co-produced by Lifetime, Swirl Films, and the GSK pharmaceutical company, which is in the middle of a big ad campaign for their vaccine against the B variant of meningitis. Apparently for some reason the standard meningitis vaccines don’t protect against the B strain, and at least according to GSK’s commercials this one, though rare, is highly serious and kills at least 10 percent of all who get the infection. The opening credits announced that GSK not only sponsored the production but influenced its actual content, which became apparent midway through when Rae suddenly contracts meningitis B and ends up in a hospital while her doctors frantically try to save her life and her limbs.

The basic plot casts Lauren Burke as a dedicated high-school senior who’s determined to got to prestigious Vanderton University’s medical school and ultimately become a pediatrician, since she was herself severely ill as a child and credits her doctors with saving her life. The problem is that, though she’s received an acceptance letter from Vanderton, it does not come with enough financial aid for her to afford the school’s tuition and other costs. Lauren hits on the idea of entering the 55th annual Miss Teen Starfire beauty contest, which offers a $50,000 first prize. That would be enough to fund her entire education, so she enters the pageant with a fierce determination to win even though her only previous experience with beauty contests had been a disastrous one well before she hit puberty in which she literally peed in her pants on stage. But she figures that since her mom Julie herself won the Starfire contest 20 years earlier, she can get her mom to coach her and win easily. Once she registers, she finds that just about all the other contestants have literally been doing beauty contests their whole lives. One of the other contestants warns Lauren to avoid the “liars, cryers, and kleptos” (i.e., “thieves”) among the entrants, including one particularly bratty one named Deanna who’s determined to win at all costs and takes an instant dislike to Our Heroine.

The contest is run by a fiercely determined senior citizen named Mrs. Brooks, whose grandson Duane is a contest official in charge of photographing the various entrants. Of course, Duane can’t resist making passes at them, though the real person the girls need to watch out for is a middle-aged man named Hammond who enters the contest world as a judge when one of the other judges has to drop out. Hammond previously molested one of the contestants during an earlier pageant when she was just a child, and when he shows up that person (Haley Gosserand) frantically calls her mother and pleads, “You promised me I’d never have to see that person again.” Lauren catches Hammond and his former victim in a position that obviously demonstrates he’d like to put an end to the “former” part of that, and when Lauren challenges him and threatens to report him to the police, Hammond sneerily asks, “What are you going to do about it?” He then comes on to Lauren herself, stating that he’s already rigged the contest to get her into the group of top five finalists and he can ensure her victory if she’ll just “be nice” to him. When Lauren refuses, she’s called in to see the fearsome Mrs. Brooks, who tells her flatly that they’ll offer her a $10,000 payoff if she’ll sign a non-disclosure agreement saying she won’t blow the whistle on the Starfire pageant and the sexual abuse to which its contestants are subjected. Lauren and her mom both righteously turn down the offer, and the contest proceeds according to schedule until it’s time for the Big Night.

During the run of the contest Lauren has been blowing off a lot of her work shifts at a local coffeehouse and counting on her friend Rae (ya remember Rae?) to cover for her – until one night when Rae is doing something else and later they have an argument in which Rae expresses her resentment at Lauren for having assumed Rae would cover for her at work whether Lauren asked her or not. Rae shows up at the various events along with Lauren’s mother Julie and also her dad (who’s presented as a barely present figure whom we see mostly in bed with Julie, sleeping through it while Julie wakes up at 2 a.m. to deal with Lauren’s latest crisis, or in the audience at the pageant). In the middle of the pageant Rae goes on a date with a mystery man (we never see him but we assume it’s a man) and admits that they kissed. The next time Lauren and Rae see each other Rae feels weak and has ominous black spots on her arms but otherwise seems O.K. until, on the eve of the final night of the pageant, she becomes deathly ill and is taken to a hospital, where she’s diagnosed with meningitis B. At this point the movie becomes the most blatantly written infomercial I’ve seen since my husband Charles (who came home midway through the film) and I watched downloads of the 1950’s TV series Martin Kane, Private Eye, which was sponsored by a tobacco company and featured a character called “The Tobacconist” whom Kane chatted with and who gave plugs for the sponsor’s products.

Rae’s doctors make all the points about meningitis B familiar from GSK’s commercials for their vaccine, and though Rae only loses two fingers from her right hand, the characters make a big deal out of the fact that even if you survive the infection, you can lose whole hands or feet from it. Ultimately on the final night of the pageant Lauren reads a poem she’d wanted to read all along about people who try to tell you what you can’t do. Then she denounces the pageant as superficial and announces she’s withdrawing from it, and as she walks off the stage the police, whom Lauren has called, bust Hammond and Mrs. Brooks. Then there’s a typical Lifetime chyron, “One Year Later,” and one year later Lauren is a freshperson at Vanderton leading a student outreach group when she happens to see a small item in a newspaper announcing that Mrs. Brooks has been convicted and sentenced to prison for her role in covering up the sexual abuse of pageant contestants. (There’s no indication that Hammond got nailed, which is likely just sloppy writing but might be a hint that Hammond is so powerful a member of the 1 percent that he, like Donald Trump, will never have to worry about being held accountable for his crimes.)

I had mixed feelings about Pretty Hurts and I was amused by how many imdb.com entries there were with that title: a 2011 TV series which is apparently still running, a 2013 Beyoncé music video, a 2017 TV miniseries, a 2018 short, a 2024 short, and a 2024 feature, plus a 2023 short called Pretty Doesn’t Hurt. I’d seen the promos with the character of Hammond and had assumed it would be typical Lifetime mildly dirty fun, but in the end it was an interesting movie but also one weighted down by the blatancy of GSK’s medical propaganda. Also there were at least two blatantly stereotyped characters who were, or at least appeared to be, Gay men: a confidant of Lauren’s and Rae’s at their high school whose single earring denoted queeniness; and a bitchy Black dance director who rehearsed the girls for their big pageant group dance with the intensity of Busby Berkeley preparing one of his enormous production numbers.