by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s feature film
on Lifetime was Til Death Do Us Part — a somewhat awkward title because the first word should be spelled
either “Till” or “’Til,” with the apostrophe at the beginning indicating it’s
supposed be a contraction of “Until” — which was carefully not advertised as a “world premiere” (the commercial
breaks included a trailer for next week’s Lifetime feature, which is a “world premiere” — Cleveland Abduction, an adaptation of the true story about how a
depressingly ordinary bus driver in Cleveland without access to the resources
of the real-life Marquis de Sade or the male lead in Fifty Shades of Grey nonetheless kept three women as hostages in his
basement and used them as sex slaves for over a decade — and as sleazy as the
subject matter is, that one should be worth seeing) and is dated 2014 instead
of 2015 on imdb.com. Til Death Do Us Part begins with the wedding of Sarah Marks (Haylie Duff) to Dr. Kevin
Richardson (Ty Olsson, tall but stocky instead of lanky and bearded instead of
clean-shaven like the bulk of Lifetime leading men), and it continues through a
series of odd red herrings that leave us in some degree of some suspense as to where the dreadful menace that’s going to afflict Our
Heroine will come from. Is it the sinister figure of the gardener, Alec Lowry
(Lindsay Bourne — a boy named Lindsay?), who when the Richardsons move to a
large house in a remote part of Washington state declares that he’s been the
gardener in the neighborhood for 30 years and essentially appoints himself to
the job? Is it the house itself, which some nice shots from director Farhad
Mann and appropriately doomy music by Michael Neilson suggest may be haunted?
Or is Lifetime merely giving us a domestic drama about the adjustment problems
facing a newlywed couple in a strange area?
No, that can’t be — instead what they are giving us is a mind-control drama in which the
danger the woman is facing comes from her overly controlling husband — sort of
like Gaslight — with a few interesting wrinkles,
like the drugs her doctor husband is having her take that are supposedly
designed to control a heart condition but are actually hallucinogenics designed
to make her hallucinate and feel like she’s going crazy (a gimmick used in a
previous Lifetime movie, Not My Life, which forced viewers to suspend disbelief even more than this one does
but was also considerably more exciting as a thriller) and the doctor’s sister
Jolene (Magda Apanowicz), who dresses like a Lifetime “loose woman” and has
such a powerful attachment to him that, as one of the characters says, it
verges on the incestuous. (This part of the plot reminded me of the remarkable
1995 film Angels and Insects, in which a mild-mannered naturalist was allowed to marry into an
aristocratic family but not to have sex with his new bride — because she was already in the throes
of a long-term incestuous relationship with her brother and she needed cover in
case the brother knocked her up.) One part of the plot is that the doctor has
just been appointed head of the cardiovascular unit at the nearby hospital and
is therefore earning enough money that his wife doesn’t have to work, but she
loves her career — teaching — and doesn’t want to give it up. She takes a job
as a substitute teacher at the local school and is befriended by colleague
Ethan Walker (Zak Santiago), only Kevin immediately gets jealous when he sees
Ethan give Sarah a ride home from work and decides to eliminate him, first by
calling in a false tip that he’s molesting kids at the school and then, when
he’s exonerated (relatively quickly and painlessly compared to how things like
this go in real life), killing him by overpowering him and dispatching him with
a lethal injection.
He does the same thing later to that pesky gardener, who accuses
Kevin of knocking off his dog and then threatens to go to the police — it turns
out Kevin’s real name is Cunningham and he was married once before to a woman
who looked strikingly like Sarah, only she died (it’s unclear from Gayl
Descoursey’s script whether he killed her, drove her to suicide or she died
accidentally), and there are dark words between Kevin and Jolene over the need
to do it perfectly “this time.” Til Death Do Us Part is a workmanlike Lifetime thriller, not anywhere
near as bad as some of the breed but not anywhere near as good as some of them,
either; despite a few nice touches in Mann’s direction (like the way the
sinister black SUV Kevin drives virtually becomes a character itself) it just
sort of rolls on and on, decently filling out its two-hour (less commercials)
running time but also not being especially exciting or moving; Lifetime has
done these tropes considerably better in other films, though at least
Descoursey’s script is credible and doesn’t end in a shoot-out involving half the
U.S. military bringing the bad guy to book — instead Our Heroine is subjected
to a murderous attack by both her husband and sister-in-law until the skeptical
female police detective (Rekha Sharma) who’d told her earlier she didn’t have
enough evidence against her husband to make a case (earlier she’d tried to copy
a compromising file from his computer onto a flash drive to take to the police,
but he’d got home unexpectedly early before she could complete the copy) finally shows up and drops the husband, then arrests
Jolene, just in the nick of time to save Our Heroine’s life.
