Do Exactly As I Say (Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, August 24) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called Do Exactly As I Say, woefully inadequately represented on imdb.com that gives much of the crew – including director Wendy Ord and writer Joy Nicole Fox – but only two actors, and neither is listed by the character names (though after you’ve seen the film it’s not hard to figure out who they are). Helen (Erin Karpluk) is a young organic chef who’s won a job as a private cook for Roman Durant, who runs a high-tech green energy company that has just developed a new technology called Palermo that is expected to transform the world. Durant has an equally glossy wife named Ardanelle, or something like that, and Helen’s direct supervisor on Durant’s household staff is a woman named Tiffany. The film opens with a chilling scene in which a blonde woman is driving at night when suddenly all the controls on her car stop working. Unable to get the car to move, she’s hit and killed by a passing fire truck. When the authorities investigate, they find nothing wrong with the car and assume she committed suicide. The scene then cuts to Helen, a widow, giving a 10th birthday party for her daughter Poppy, who confesses that for her last birthday wish she wished that her mom find a job. (The actress playing Poppy looks more like 13 or 14 than 10, but that’s a common enough movie failing we’ll let that pass.) Poppy walks home from school one afternoon and forgets to lock the door behind her, and when Helen returns home from work she finds that Poppy is gone and her stuffed giraffe is gone with her. Helen suspects that Poppy has been kidnapped, and she gets confirmation of that when a mysterious and heavily filtered voice phones her and tells her she will have to do three tasks to get her daughter back alive, sort of like the legendary 12 labors of Hercules. Helen pleads with the kidnapper at least to be given the whole list of tasks at once, but she’s told no, they will be doled out one by one. Of course, Helen also gets the standard-issue kidnappers’ warnings not to call the police or to tell anyone.

It turns out all the instructions relate to Durant’s personal and professional secrets. The first one is to hack his computer (fortunately the mystery voice has all his passwords, which alone should have let Helen know it’s a job from inside Durant’s household) and download a file containing all the extant photos of Durant in flagrante delicto with all his extra-relational partners. The second is similarly to download, this time onto a thumb drive (which leads to the same sort of silly high-tech suspense sequence that ended John Grisham’s The Firm: will she get all the files copied before the bad guys catch her?), a set of published reports indicating that the Durant company, belying its self-created image as environmental saviors, is actually generating massive amounts of toxic waste and dumping them in poor neighborhoods. (Once again, I found myself wondering why this was being portrayed as some deep, dark secret that would ruin Durant’s company when all the articles seem to have come from already published sources.) Meanwhile, we’ve seen Helen’s boss Tiffany on her car phone actually giving Helen the instructions through a heavily filtered voice – until her car stops working the same way the anonymous victim’s (whom we’ve since learned is a former Durant employee named Julie) did in the first act. Ultimately Tiffany’s car veers off a side road into a ravine below, killing her. But that doesn’t stop the instructions from the kidnapper. Helen’s third task is to murder Roman Durant – which she has no intention of doing until the kidnapper leaves Poppy’s stuffed giraffe on her car with a note attached saying, “Roman or Poppy. You decide.” Accordingly she takes an herb and inserts it into Roman’s ice cubes while they have a steak dinner with servings of whiskey. Helen gives Roman a preposterous excuse that she’s always been trained to drink “straight,” so Roman throws the ice cubes from her glass and gives her a straight shot instead. Roman collapses during the dinner and Helen takes a photo of him and sends it to the kidnapper to prove that Roman is dead.

Then Helen learns that Poppy has been in the Durants’ home all this time and the real mastermind behind the plot was [spoiler alert!] Roman’s wife Ardanelle, who was determined first to destroy Roman’s company and his reputation and then get rid of him and frame Helen to take the fall. Only Roman isn’t dead – whatever it was Helen gave him merely incapacitated him instead of killing him – and there’s the predictable final confrontation during which Roman sneaks up behind Ardanelle and grabs her gun, she draws a knife on him, the two kill each other and then the police (previously called by Ardanelle on 911 as part of her plot to frame Helen for Roman’s murder) arrive and take both Helen and Poppy (who begs them for an ambulance ride) out of the situation. There’s a finale in which Helen has sold her house and is moving to Portland (the whole story takes place in Oregon, but it’s not clear where Durant’s home and offices were, though Eugene seems likely), where Helen has lined up a job at an actual restaurant instead of a private home. David (Philip Prajoux), Roman’s original right-hand man and old college buddy until Roman fired him for reasons director Ord and writer Fox kept ambiguous (though they did a pretty good job of setting David up as a red herring), comes up to them as they’re moving out. He confesses that he’s long been romantically interested in Helen and also informs her that the board of directors of the Durant company has hired him as the new CEO, now that Mr. and Mrs. Durant have eliminated each other and he’s got the best chance of anybody to rehabilitate the company’s destroyed reputation, and there’s a hint of a future relationship between them.

Aside from the ultra-limited information online about it, Do Exactly As I Say is a frustrating movie given how many plot holes it contains. There are some neat things about it, including Helen’s rather futile struggle for privacy as she takes the phone calls from the kidnapper while alone – just about everyone in Roman’s inner circle keeps walking in on her just as she’s in the middle of a high-stakes conversation with the kidnapper – and the whole gimmick of the car being operated by remote control so the driver no longer has command of it is just a higher-tech version of the separate set of pedals villain Steve Cochran had in the back seat of his car in the 1946 film The Chase through which he could take command from the nominal driver and control how fast the car would go, though not in which direction. Do Exactly As I Say had the makings of a first-rate thriller (and the writing of Roman as something of an Elon Musk clone is nicely done even though, with the Trump counter-revolution in full swing, the idea that a major ultra-rich oligarch would be seeking his fortune in alternative energy and presenting himself as the environment’s ultimate savior seems horrendously dated), but much of Fox’s script literally makes no sense. The film’s biggest improbability is why Ardanelle would be working so hard to destroy her husband’s reputation when even if she did kill him and get away with it, her investment would be worth a lot less than it would have been if her husband’s dirty secrets had stayed secret. Also, it’s hard to get worked up about these people when we’re given so little information about who they are and what their motives are, either for good or ill.