A Stranger's Baby (Enlighten Content, HTRTC Productions, Tubi Films, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Sunday, August 10) I watched an unusually good Lifetime movie called A Stranger’s Baby, about a woman named Donna Fendyr (pronounced “fender”) Dusk (Jessica Lowndes), who’s six months pregnant when her husband Scott Dusk (Justin Lacey) is killed in a traffic accident while driving the truck they use in their moving business, which has the clever name “From Donna to Dusk.” (That might have been a better title for the movie, too.) We see this in a prologue, and then the film flashes forward a year and Donna herself is involved in a car accident. She survives but she’s in a coma for a week, and when she comes to she’s startled that her brother Mason Fendyr (Brad Harder, who was so nice-looking I wondered if he was going to turn out to be the villain, the way most Lifetime movies that feature hot-looking guys have them turn out to be bad guys) has been looking after her three-month-old baby. This puzzles Donna because her recollection was that she lost her and her husband’s baby to a miscarriage just before her accident. The airwaves of the town in Arizona where this is taking place are being flooded with announcements from Dr. Leon Weston (Clayton James) and his wife Amira (Zibby Allen) looking for the people who allegedly kidnapped their baby daughter. Slowly Donna becomes convinced that her own baby did indeed die in a miscarriage and the baby Mason has been taking care of on her behalf is the Westons’ missing child. She also realizes she’s being stalked by mysterious strangers who may not be so strange after all; both the Westons are hanging around her place spying on her for reasons that for the moment remain mysterious. When Donna and her brother Mason order a DNA test on the baby, whose name is Cleo, they get back a report that the baby’s DNA is only a 23 percent match for Donna’s – indicating that the child is a blood relative but not her direct progeny.

Eventually both we and Donna learn [spoiler alert!] that the baby is indeed Amira Weston’s but the father is Donna’s brother Mason. Cleo is the product of an extra-relational affair between Amira and Mason, which Mason agreed to enter into on Amira’s assurance that she was planning to divorce Leon and Mason’s growing conviction that he had found the woman for him. As things turn out, Leon is the real villain of the piece – and Clayton James delivers a deep, effective portrait of barely controlled evil. Leon is a controlling bastard who exemplifies the old joke, “What do you call a man who thinks he’s God? A schizophrenic. What do you call a man who knows he’s God? A doctor.” One night he comes home from work and declares to his wife, “I saved a life today – several lives, actually.” He denounces her as “a whore” for her extra-relational affairs, though he’s also determined to recover baby Cleo and raise her as his own. In one chilling scene, which Donna witnesses because she’s sneaking around the Westons’ home convinced that her late husband Scott was having an affair with Amira (which, it turns out, he wasn’t), Leon threatens to beat and rape his wife. Donna is frustrated because she’d like to report the crime in progress to the police but she doesn’t dare because then the call could be traced to her. So she and Mason drive out to a motel that still has a landline and call the police from there, but by the time the cops, in the person of a heavy-set Black officer named Graeme (Byron Wilson), arrive at the Westons’ Amira is so intimidated by her husband that she lies to protect him and said the noises whoever called thought they heard were just the sounds of consensual, if rather rough, sex. Officer Graeme questions the propriety of them having sex while their daughter is missing, but Amira turns the tables on them and says how dare he question their grief and their choices for how to deal with it.

Ultimately we learn [double spoiler alert!] that Amira herself deliberately turned over baby Cleo to Donna in the hospital because she wanted her to be raised by her dad and her aunt rather than become just one more weapon in her unequal power struggle with Leon, only Donna forgot this because of the “retrograde amnesia” caused by her own accident. Determined to recover his wife’s baby, Leon visits Mason’s home and pistol-whips him, taking the baby, while in the meantime he’s given his wife Amira an injection of a knock-out drug and tied her up to her bed, from which Amira uses her Amazon Alexa to call Donna and ask her to come over. Amira specifically tells Donna not to call the police, though eventually Donna does and she and Mason press charges for assault against Leon. But Leon still has Cleo, and he makes Donna an offer she can’t refuse: in exchange for Mason dropping the charges against him, Leon will show him his security video of what actually happened to Scott. Mason and Donna agree to the deal, and what Leon shows Donna convinces her that Amira was directly responsible for Scott’s death: he crashed to avoid hitting her car and she left the scene without calling 911, which could have saved Scott’s life if an ambulance had come to the scene in time. Leon gives Donna his gun and tells her to go kill Amira in revenge for Scott’s death, and Donna actually fires four bullets at her back during an outdoor confrontation at night. Fortunately, all four bullets miss, and when she and Amira finally confront each other, Amira explains that it was actually Leon who was responsible for Scott’s death. Leon was standing in the roadway on purpose that fateful night, and it was to avoid hitting him that Scott made that fatal swerve into a lamppost. When the accident happened, Amira actually got out of her car and offered to help Scott, but Scott, not realizing how badly he’d been hurt, told her to keep fleeing her husband.

It ends in another dead-of-night confrontation in which Leon is determined to kill both Mason and Donna, only Amira, whom he thinks he’s incapacitated, sneaks up behind him and kills Leon right when Leon is about to kill Donna. In a tag scene taking place a year later, Mason and Donna are shown co-parenting Cleo (well, Mason is her father, after all, and Donna her aunt) and giving her her first-year birthday party. A Stranger’s Baby was ballyhooed as a Lifetime “premiere,” which it wasn’t; it was actually made in 2024 for the Tubi free ad-supported streaming service and racked up a number of imdb.com reviews in the Tubi incarnation, most of them pretty lukewarm. I actually quite liked the film, partly due to the effective suspense direction of Monika Mitchell, partly due to the well-constructed (albeit with a few lapses; I really didn’t believe how easily Leon was able to convince Donna that Amira murdered Scott, and I was expecting to hear that the video allegedly implicating Amira in Scott’s death had been created by Leon via AI) screenplay by Helen Marsh, but mainly due to Clayton James’s excellent performance as the villain. Instead of either going for Lawrence Tierney-style overstatement or Anthony Perkins-style understatement (the two basic ways of playing a psychopath on screen), James is cool as the proverbial cucumber, pursuing his evil agenda with a grim determination and a relentless self-assurance that dares anyone to come along and prove that he’s really a bad guy. I was also struck by Clayton James’s resemblance to Elon Musk; the two look enough alike that if anyone out there wants to dare make a biopic of Musk and show him as the sick, crazed monster he is, Clayton James would be excellent casting for the role.