by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I put on Lifetime’s latest “premiere,” a film called The
Midwife’s Deception which sounds, like the
recent Bad Tutor, like the
Lifetime producers, directors and writers are running out of seemingly
“perfect” service jobs whose holders have psycho designs on their employers.
This time the script was written and directed by the same person, Letia
Clouston (yet another talented woman filmmaker who deserves opportunities at
bigger outlets than Lifetime and this film’s production company, Distilled
Media — as opposed to Tap Media or Spring Media?), and though she ran through a
lot of the usual items on the checklist for Lifetime scripts (psycho, innocent
victim, innocent victim’s decent but clueless spouse, and innocent victim’s
best friend who tries to expose the psycho and gets knocked off for her pains),
she turned in a better job than usual at both writing and direction. I think
what makes this a better movie than the Lifetime norm (though not by all that
much) is that Clouston, like Christine Conradt, is willing to make her
characters complex and also keep a lot of the backstory unstated instead of
throwing everything at us. The central characters are Daniel Miller (Billy
Armstrong, a hot-looking guy who for once on a Lifetime movie is not a villain) and his very visibly pregnant wife Sara (Katie Savoy, who looks
so convincing as a woman in the later stages of pregnancy I wondered if
Clouston had cast an actress who actually was pregnant for the role). The Millers have just moved
from Los Angeles, where she had worked as an attorney until taking time off to
have her baby and spend the first year or two of her (they know it’s going to
be a her and they’ve named her Eloise) life bonding with her, to the small town
in Kentucky where he grew up.
One of the gimmicks in Clouston’s script is that
there are a lot of nubile young women who remember Daniel as the big hottie
from high school and still have crushes on him — which understandably makes
Sara feel jealous, even though the woman who actually was Daniel’s high-school
girlfriend, Allie (Katie McClellan, who’s shorter than Katie Savoy but also has
long black hair and a similar face — one wonders if this is Daniel’s “type”),
becomes her best friend in town. Eventually we learn that Sara has been through
two previous pregnancies but miscarried both of them, and she’s understandably
anxious about this one and making sure she makes it and actually gives birth to
a live baby. Enter the bad girl, Jina (Penelope Mitchell), who runs into Sara
at a local café (which has the odd name “Shakespeare and Company” — I remember
that as the name of a famous bookstore in Berkeley, back when there still were
bookstores!) whose proprietor is yet another woman who knew Daniel back in high
school and had the hots for him. Jina introduces herself as a certified
nurse-midwife and offers to take charge of Sara during her pregnancy and help
her through a home birth, despite the misgivings of Sara’s pediatrician, Dr.
Collins (played by Matt Clouston, real-life husband of the writer-director —
who seems to have named the central couple “Miller” after her own maiden name).
One point Clouston’s script makes is how much life in small towns really is based on everyone knowing everyone else: Jina takes
Sara to a meeting of mothers-to-be at the restaurant and Sara shows how much of
a fish out of water she is by bringing a salad made from quinoa and kale. Of
course no one else at the event has ever heard of quinoa! Though Sara is determined to avoid
alcohol and caffeine during her pregnancy, Jina sneaks out her smartphone and
uses it to take pictures of Sara with the forbidden drinks close to her mouth.
Sara demands that Jina not post these to social media — she has a phobia about
having any pictures of herself
online, which Clouston keeps powerfully unexplained the way the writers of Casablanca carefully kept us in the dark as to just what
Bogart’s character had done that prevented him from returning to the U.S.
Jina
shows us she’s up to no good well
before the other characters learn that; we see her in her grey SUV stalking the
Millers at night, and later she gives them an elaborate candlestick for their
bedroom with a red mug on top of it “to warm you up at night,” but the objet
d’art is carefully bugged, with a hidden
camera that allows Jina to log on from home and eavesdrop on the goings-on in
the Millers’ bedroom. The biggest thing that happens in the Millers’ bedroom
that we get to see is a nice
Lifetime-style soft-core porn scene in which Daniel attempts to have sex with
his wife, but the baby-to-be in her belly just keeps getting in the way. (Lifetime
used to do a lot more soft-core
porn than their norm now, and I miss it.) It’s only two-thirds of the way
through the movie that we finally
learn Jina’s true motive: she wants to kill both Daniel and Sara and take their
baby for herself. They’re currently living in the house formerly occupied by
Daniel’s mother until her recent death, and the house has uncomfortable Rebecca-esque memories; her plan is to burn down the house
with an incapacitated Daniel and Sara inside, frame it to look like a murder-suicide
in which Sara’s fetus died as well as both parents, and take the baby and raise
it since no authorities will know the kid still exists. About the only
explanation Clouston gives us as to why she’s doing this is a speech she gives towards the end in which she
says she wants the girl to grow up with a proper appreciation of how tough the
world really is instead of being sheltered by the Millers from the nastier
realities of life. Along the way Jina posts her pics of Sara apparently
drinking on social media — which leads to the rest of the women in town
snubbing her as a hypocrite — and when Allie gets too close to the truth, Jina
kills her, first drugging her and then smothering her with a large
horseshoe-shaped cushion — after which she buries Allie on Daniel’s and Sara’s
property, thereby (she hopes) framing Sara for her murder. She also steals
Allie’s cell phone and continues to text Sara regularly in Allie’s persona, so when Sara finally stumbles onto the truth about
Jina — her real name is Leslie Ann Phelps and under that identity she has a
social-media page boasting about the imminent birth of “her” baby — instead of
alerting a friend she’s tipping off Jina that she knows.
The climax takes place
at the Millers’ home, which Jina sets on fire with a drugged Sara, who’s also
starting to have contractions indicating the birth is imminent, inside. Daniel
comes home but Jina quickly overpowers him, clubbing him into unconsciousness
with a baseball bat, and there’s a big to-do about a gun Daniel’s mother left
him which is locked in a safe somewhere in the house — but can Daniel get to it
before Jina does? Jina guesses that the Millers have set Sara’s birthday as the
combination to the safe, but it’s actually Daniel’s and Sara’s wedding date —
and with that information Sara is able to retrieve the gun and shoot Jina to
death just before Jina is about to dispatch her husband. (Letia Clouston quite literally took Chekhov’s advice to budding playwrights that if
you introduce a pistol in act one, someone has to fire it in act three.) The
Midwife’s Deception is well done, and
Clouston’s powerful suspense direction and use of dramatic ambiguity in her
script sets this one ahead of most Lifetime movies even though all too much of
it is based on the network’s usual formulae; and given Lifetime’s recent
penchant for endings in which the principal villain escapes to wreak his or her
havoc on some other unsuspecting person in another city, it was nice to see
Clouston end this one with a shot
of Jina at the window of the burning house (an obvious quote from Alfred
Hitchcock’s shot of Judith Anderson at the end of Rebecca), about to go out in flames with it. She even
avoided the expected everything-is-back-to-normal coda of the Millers in the
hospital with their brand-new baby girl! The Midwife’s Deception is a formula piece, but a quite good one within the
formula’s limits, and I look forward to seeing more for Letia Clouston — she
goes on my list along with Christine Conradt and Vanessa Parise of women
directors on Lifetime who’ve clearly “made their bones” and shown they’re ready
for feature films.
