by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I put on Lifetime last
night and watched a pretty typical one of their “made-for-TV movies,” the
“world premiere” of something with the bizarre and dorky-sounding title Wrong
Swipe. Directed by Matthew
Leutwiler from a script by Sophie Tilson and Shanrah Wakefield (I’m presuming
that’s two women writing a script to be directed by a man — I’ve praised
Lifetime for giving opportunities to women directors before and I’m mildly
curious why they didn’t do so here), Wrong Swipe refers to a dating application — or, to use the
current argot, “app” — for smartphones.
Swipe is the name of this thing and its peculiar feature is it not only matches
you with potential mates based on an algorithm comparing the “profiles” they
submit, its intrusiveness in your life reaches NSA-level proportions. Every
time someone who’s marked themselves as having a “crush” on you comes within
100 feet of you, it sounds an alert on your phone and sends you a text message
to that effect — and it repeats that process if the person comes within 50 feet
of you, and again if they’re even closer. The film actually begins with a
suburban dinner scene in which a middle-aged man, his wife and their two
daughters are sitting down to dinner when one of them complains that dad’s car
is blocking their own. (The show is surprisingly uncertain as to how old its
protagonists are, but it seems from this opening that the daughters — one of
them, anyway — are at least old enough to drive.) Dad goes out to move it —
and is gunned down and killed by a kid in a hoodie who was trying to steal his
car. Next there’s a title reading “Five Years Later” — Lifetime does a lot of
this gimmick of starting the story well before the main events take place and
then flashing us forward, but the gap between prologue and main story is
usually not that long — and it turns out
the daughters, sisters Sasha (Karissa Staples) and Anna (Anna Hutchison)
Taylor, have bought (or rented, we’re not sure which — just as only a phone
number with a 213 area code gives away that this is taking place in the Los
Angeles area) a home of their own while their mom is still living in seclusion
in the same house the family was in when dad was murdered. They’re both in
college — Anna keeps talking about going to law school but she’s already taking
a criminal law class from professor Ivan (Eric Scott Woods), while Sasha is
studying art — and Sasha has a seemingly excellent relationship with an old
boyfriend named Matt (Rhys Ward) who’s cute without being overwhelmingly sexy
and who seems to be nuzzling her just about every time he’s over at their
house, which is often. Sasha boasts that after losing track of him she
re-connected with Matt through this really cool dating app called Swipe, and at
one point she grabs Anna’s phone and starts signing her up for Swipe without
telling her or getting her permission.
Anna is a “grind” with little interest
in men, period — she’d much rather curl up with a law book (or a computer
logged on to a legal Web site) than some guy — and though she tries out Swipe
and even gets a few dates from it, she’s not thrilled by the experience. The
first guy she meets via Swipe is Todd (Blake Berris), who’s been supplied by
the costume and prop departments with a pair of Buddy Holly-style glasses just
so we know he’s a nerd (albeit a socially challenged nerd who doesn’t know
enough about social interactions to be comfortable about women, so he’s either
retiring or too strong). He’s a fellow student in her criminal-law class whom
she’s never noticed before, and he keeps coming on to her because “you swiped
me!” even though she keeps trying to explain that in the non-Internet world she
has nothing particularly against him but doesn’t like him that way. Her next date is a guy named Jake (Arthur
Napiontek, who especially in his half-open shirt did more for me than any of the other males in the cast), a jock
from her high-school days who’s since bulked up even more and acquired an
attitude; when she turns away from him on their first date in a bar and picks
up her phone to receive a call from her mom, Jake slips something from a small
white vial into her drink. Fortunately, Anna leaves the bar to go to her mom
and only takes a small amount of the drugged drink, but it’s enough that when
she returns home from her mom’s the stuff puts her under and she passes out. (I
joked that Jake apparently wanted to be the white Bill Cosby.) Her next Swipe date is a considerable improvement: a nice
guy, an aspiring architect named Pete (Philipp Karner) who’s genuinely
attractive and who therefore, by Lifetime’s iconography, is marked as either a
villain or (less likely) a victim. Unfortunately, Anna’s life is being made
miserable by one of her Swipe wanna-be boyfriends, who keeps intruding on the
space within which the program will alert her to his presence and sending her
texts headed “Watching U.”
There’s actually an effective level of suspense as
to who it’s going to turn out to be — though much of the suspense is trying to
guess ahead of the writers which of the common Lifetime cliché tropes they’ll invoke to move their story
to the next level. There are a couple of red-herring shots that hint that
Anna’s professor is her cyber-stalker (he lectures her about having her cell
phone on in class and then, once she’s left at the end of the period, starts
tapping away at his own phone), and eventually Anna reports what’s going on to
the police and gives them the names of Todd, Jake and other guys she’s met
through the site. It turns out [spoiler alert!] that the real cyber-stalker is Sasha’s boyfriend
Matt — the revelation gives us a neat frisson even though writers Tilson and Wakefield don’t
even bother to try to give him a
comprehensible motive. At least they resisted the temptation they must have
felt to have him turn out also to be the
car thief who killed their dad five years earlier! There’s a nice confrontation
scene in which Anna traces Matt to a deserted restaurant and carries her dad’s
old gun, which she’s never fired since the days when dad took his girls to
shooting ranges and let them practice — Matt gets the drop on her and gets the
gun, they struggle, the gun falls loose, the police arrive but it’s Sasha who
shoots down her ex-boyfriend for attacking her sister and also strangling Pete
in his car in an earlier scene (which was where this movie went from being
dramatically credible fun to totally off-the-wall). There’s a tag scene with
the two women single but alive and otherwise well at the end, and mom finally coming out of her hermit-like shell to be with
them at their place. It’s a competent,
well-done movie with a lot of suspense but too many loose ends and other lacunae in the plot to be all that good — though kudos to
casting director Paul Ruddy for actually having found three actresses who look
enough alike to be credible in the parts of a mother and her two daughters!
