The Ocean Between Them (10260287 Manitoba, Evoke Canadian Pictures, Evoke Entertainment, Corus Entertainment, Lifetime, 2026)

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

Last night (Saturday, September 19) I bypassed Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” showing on Turner Classic Movies (he was doing the 1948 film Key Largo, directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart and his fourth wife, Lauren Bacall, in their final film together even though he had eight more years to live) and instead watched an O.K. Lifetime made-for-TV production, The Ocean Between Them. Directed (quite effectively) by Gabriel Correa from a committee-written script (Yuri Baranovsky, Angela Guiner, and Sam Lee get the writing credits), The Ocean Between Them is a well-made but pretty predictable thriller about an overprotective single mother, Joan Callahan (Rebecca Gayehart) and her two daughters, 20-something Miranda (Jessica Lord) and teenager Ashley (Georgia Dane). Joan has been overprotective ever since the backstory, when Miranda nearly died in a rock-climbing accident. Joan nursed her back to health in a hospital room that had two butterflies nesting outside its window but there’ve been tensions between them ever since. Joan wants Miranda to pull back from her free-swinging lifestyle as well as her drinking; when the film opens she and Ashley are impatiently waiting for Miranda’s plane to return from Rome, where Miranda has taken her latest vacation, to their small town in Oklahoma. Joan has peppered Miranda’s cell phone with increasingly frantic where-the-hell-are-you type calls, and just as they’ve about given up on her Miranda bursts in, obviously drunk. She swings her bag in the hall accidentally and breaks a ceramic vase, much to Joan’s consternation (fortunately at least the writers spared us the information that this was a vase worth five figures and/or a priceless family heirloom!). Miranda further upsets Joan by announcing that she’s only going to stay a day and a half before she goes on vacation again, this time to the (real) Caribbean island of Belize. Then Miranda has a look through some old photos of Joan in a box she was intending to put in storage, and she learns that Joan was quite the adventuress herself in her day, including taking wild trips that involved machete-wielding hikes through rain forests. After the girlfriend Miranda was intending to take with her to Belize bails, Miranda impulsively invites her mom to join her as her traveling companion (what arrangements they make for Ashley are not clear; maybe they trust her to be alone for the week or two they’re going to be gone, and in any event Ashley departs from the story completely once Miranda and Joan set off on their trip).

When they get to Belize they meet some charming young Black men who work at their resort, including headwaiter Isaac and his cousin, bartender Luke (Karl Walcott), who turns out to live most of the year in Dallas and just comes to Belize because his dad was from there until dad died some time before. The first night they’re there Miranda sneaks off for a rendezvous with Luke and spends the night with him, much to her mom’s understandable discomfiture (though there’s a hint that Joan was actually jealous and interested in Luke herself). The film’s main intrigue occurs when Miranda rents a kayak and for some reason ventures into the ocean, then gets caught in a couple of tropical storms. (The movie opened with a scene in which Miranda’s kayak is greeted by a shark, which then cuts to a flashback until the shark scene reappears two-thirds of the way into the running time.) The film cuts back and forth between Miranda’s ordeal at sea and Joan’s increasingly frantic attempts to get a rescue party to find her, which at one point involves her having to raise $1,200 in cash to hire a (white) private-plane pilot to look for her from the air. (What they were supposed to do for her if they’d spotted her was unclear; if the aircraft had been a helicopter they could at least theoretically have rescued her from it, but not with a plane.) Ultimately after both storms subside the local boat pilot, Captain Miguel Gonzalez (Adrian Garbutt), takes his boat out with Joan in hopes of finding her. At first they miss Miranda’s signal, but ultimately Miranda and Joan swim out to each other and she’s rescued at long last. Instead of the payoff I was expecting, which was that the two Callahans would forever swear off further adventuring, they talk about going on a trip to Alaska and riding dog-drawn sleds. I give director Correa a lot of credit for highly effective suspense editing (even though there’s not much doubt about the outcome; stories like this end unhappily all too often in real life, but not in Lifetime movies!) and even more credit for effectively and credibly reproducing the Caribbean off the coast of Manitoba in southern Canada, where the film was shot. I quite liked The Ocean Between Them even though it was all too predictable and the acting, though credible, wasn’t any great shakes. Rebecca Gayehart’s attitude as Joan just got to be really overbearing at times, and cinematographer Greg Nicod seemed to be going for too many shots of Jessica Lord in fashionable states of undress, with as much of her cleavage showing as he could dare for a basic-cable movie, rendering her less a sympathy-inducing victim than a bit of sexual delectation for any young straight men who might have stumbled onto the cable network that used to bill itself as “Television for Women”!