Her Husband's Double Life (Five Bridges Entertainment, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2026)

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

After The Babysitter’s Double Life I watched the very similarly titled Her Husband’s Double Life, an intriguing title because the main “pussy in peril” this time is not the legal wife of the male lead but simply his fiancée. She’s Carrie Morgan (Tanisha Thammavongsa), a paramedic, who in the opening scene is finally receiving a marriage proposal from her boyfriend Timothy Blake (Jordan Van Dyck) after they’ve been living together for three years and have bought a house together. Only just after she accepts his ring, she’s called to the scene of an auto accident along with her work partner Nina Lopez (Shanna Armogan), who despite her Latina last name presents as Black, so I feared she was going to end up as The Heroine’s African-American Best Friend Who Stumbles Onto the Villain’s Plot But Gets Killed Before She Can Warn Her. (Fortunately, she didn’t.) Much to Carrie’s surprise, the victim is Timothy, and no sooner have she and Nina brought Timothy to the local emergency room (the film is set in Philadelphia) than she’s confronted by a family she had no idea Timothy had. They consist of Brianna Blake (Sarah Cleveland), Timothy’s legal wife of 20 years; their grown daughter Sophie (Anastasiya Filimonova); and Timothy’s mother Laurel (Toni Ellwand). The Blakes have ordered that no one who isn’t part of Timothy’s “immediate family” be admitted to see him, and since Carrie doesn’t qualify as such she’s barred from his room. Then we get a mysterious shot of someone sneaking into Timothy’s room and injecting his IV with some sort of nefarious substance that’s potentially lethal to him. The substance turns out to be insulin, which is fatal to Timothy since he wasn’t diabetic, and the doctors are unable to revive him in time. The Philadelphia police assign the case, once it’s officially ruled a homicide, to Detective Kyle Logan (Justin Nurse), who just happens to have dated Carrie before she hooked up with Timothy. In order to get more information on Timothy, Carrie befriends Timothy’s brother Noah (Ash Catherwood, a tall, rail-thin actor who didn’t look that much like Jordan Van Dyck, but he was dressed in sufficiently tight blue jeans and flashed a nice enough basket I didn’t care!), only when she pays a visit to Noah’s home she finds him stabbed to death on his kitchen floor.

By then Carrie has established enough of a modus vivendi with Brianna and Laurel that she’s permitted in their home, though daughter Sophie still hates her and doesn’t want to be in the same room with her. It’s established that Timothy was able to get away with having a wife and a fiancée because he was an airline pilot who frequently made transcontinental flights, so his work responsibilities kept him away from both homes a lot and provided him with a ready-made excuse he could tell the members of one household while he was in the other. In fact, once we learned that Timothy’s and Noah’s father had been a real-estate developer and had hoped his sons would follow him into that business, but they bailed on it and Timothy became an airline pilot instead, I wondered if writer Audrey C. Marie had got that plot point from the Trumps: Donald’s father, Fred Trump, had been a real-estate developer and landlord in the outer boroughs of New York City and his oldest son, Fred Trump, Jr., bailed on the family business and became an airline pilot. Marie and director Roxanne Boisvert keep us in a fair amount of suspense as to who the murderer is going to be; for a while they seem to be pointing towards Sophie, who’s seen breaking into Carrie’s home, breaking the glass frame of a photo of Carrie with Timothy, and stealing one of Timothy’s shirts that Carrie had been sleeping with as a form of consolation. We’re also thrown Nina as another red herring when she shows up at Carrie’s home carrying the same ornate handbag the mystery woman who confronted Timothy about his affairs in a security video from a coffeehouse which Detective Logan showed Carrie was holding.

In the end the killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Detective Logan, who was jealous of Timothy for having got Carrie and also hated him because his father had had affairs with other women (the “C”-word is used in the dialogue) and he didn’t want to see Carrie get caught up in a relationship with someone who was already married. Detective Logan gives the game away when he talks about a man named Victor whom Carrie briefly dated between breaking up with him and taking up with Timothy. Logan says he heard about Victor from Nina, but Nina insists via an audio text message she sends to Carrie that she never talked about Victor to Logan. (I should have known that the hunkiest guy in the cast would turn out to be the bad guy: that’s an all too common Lifetime trope, even though Ash Catherwood did a lot more for me as a lust object than Justin Nurse did!) There’s an exciting climax in which Logan insists that he’s going to kill anyone who comes between him and Carrie; the two fight on the ground and Logan’s gun slips out of its holster; and Brianna Blake, of all people, grabs Logan’s gun and drills him with it, killing him. The film ends with an uncertain reunion between Carrie and Brianna, though Sophie still isn’t reconciled to the situation, and Carrie decides to leave her work as a paramedic to organize a foundation to offer psychological support to people in similarly emotionally discombobulated situations.

The whole film reminded me of The Bigamist, a quite good 1953 thriller directed by Ida Lupino and starring her and Joan Fontaine as Edmond O’Brien’s two wives. The Bigamist’s writers, Lawrence B. Marcus and Lou Schor, made O’Brien’s character a man who was frequently out of town on business and who drifted into bigamy when one of his wives turned out to be infertile while the other one actually conceived a child with him. In that case the plot unraveled (in both senses) when he and the infertile wife tried to adopt a child together and the whole scheme got discovered by the agents of the adoption agency doing their standard background check. Though the actual memorial service for Timothy is not shown, there’s dialogue explaining that Brianna doesn’t want Carrie to come but Carrie insists on going anyway, agreeing to sit in the back and not speak to anyone who was connected to Timothy via his life with Brianna. That reminded me of the story about how when Spencer Tracy died in 1967, his longtime partner Katharine Hepburn refused to go to his funeral because she thought that was the place for his estranged wife Louise and their children. Overall, though, Her Husband’s Double Life was a bit of a disappointment, hardly the slice of good clean sleazy fun the title kinda-sorta promised, though if my husband Charles had seen it with me (he was late coming home from work last night because he gave a co-worker a ride home and got back just at the point where Det. Logan was about to be revealed as the killer) he’d have definitely approved of its message against extra-relational activity!