To Catch a Cheater (Sunshine Films Florida, Studio TF1 America, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 15) I watched a couple of movies on Lifetime, both of them rather grim thrillers with surprise twist endings. The first one was To Catch a Cheater, a story about three women who each gave birth to their daughters on the same day and thereafter formed a bond that lasted until … well, until the story began nearly 18 years later. The three older women are Monica Jackson (Kate Watson), Bridget Lewis (Sheila Leason), and Kim (Jessie Pettit), whose last name, if it were ever mentioned, I didn’t catch. Their daughters are Hannah Wilson (Jordan Kennedy), Charli Lewis (Valentina Rivas), and Megan (Lily Bowen). The movie begins with Charli proposing a so-called “cheaters’ pact” with Hannah and Megan to see if their boyfriends are pursuing opportunities for extra-relational activity. The way this pact works is sort of like Mozart’s (and Lorenzo da Ponte’s) opera Cosi fan Tutte with the genders reversed: each of the women will go online and assume a phony identity to see if they can attract each others’ boyfriends’ attention for transitory hook-ups. Accordingly Megan stands up her boyfriend and sends Hannah to try to seduce him instead. Only the evening ends in tragedy: Hannah slips and falls down outdoor stairs and ends up dead on the rocks on the beach below. Needless to say, Monica is less than thrilled at the sudden death of her daughter just as she’s about to turn 18 and graduate from high school to college and a better life. Monica’s estranged husband David (Philip Boyd) – they appear to have separated but not divorced, though David is living and working in another city and before she croaked Hannah mentioned an upcoming weekend she had to spend ßwith dad – returns to the scene and he and Monica reunite to determine what happened to their daughter.

The police rule Hannah’s death an accident, but both Monica and David are convinced it was murder. But who? As the grim story takes its course we learn that Kim’s husband Doug (Roy Lynam) was having an affair with Bridget. We also learn that Kim and Bridget had launched a company that, though all it appears to make is little scent or chemical bottles they display on their living-room table, is about either to get sold to a major company or do an initial public offering (IPO) which will make both of them millions. Only Bridget is hyper-concerned that nothing happen to them that would jeopardize their deal and cause a scandal that could derail it. (Maybe she should have thought of that before she got sexually involved with her partner’s husband.) Monica gets a series of threatening letters from anonymous sources warning her to stop investigating her daughter’s death, and in the end we learn that the real killer is [spoiler alert!] Kim, who offed Hannah because Hannah had caught Kim’s husband Doug and Bridget making out in their SUV. Kim demanded that Hannah remain silent about this and, when Hannah refused, Kim pushed her down the flight of stairs and thereby killed her. Written by Rachel Morton and directed by old Lifetime hand Damián Romay, To Catch a Cheater is a good example of a Lifetime movie that could have been a great deal better if the Lifetime writer had known when to ease up on the passion pedal. (The metaphor comes from Roald Dahl’s short story “The Great Automatic Grammatisator,” in which a couple of computer scientists invent a machine than can write – essentially artificial intelligence decades early – including a set of organ-like pedals that control the amount of passion in the final text.) The idea of an estranged couple suddenly having to deal with the death of a daughter on the cusp of adulthood could have been a very interesting and moving drama, but writer Morton pushed too hard on the melodramatics and the result was another piece of Lifetime sludge – stylishly directed sludge (Damián Romay definitely knows his way around a camera), but sludge all the same.