by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched one of the
better Lifetime movies I’ve seen lately, A Father’s Nightmare — billed on its imdb.com page as a direct sequel
to A Mother’s Nightmare (though
I don’t have a report on that one and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it; the
sequence also includes A Sister’s Nightmare and the one of the bunch I have seen, A Daughter’s Nightmare, in which the titular protagonist realizes that
her stepbrother is crazy and is slowly poisoning her mom) — which turned out to
be a pretty typical
young-college-student-gets-lured-down-the-primrose-path-by-her-crazy-roommate
Lifetime story but done with unusual style by director Vic Sarin (though given
his last name I couldn’t help but joke, “Ah, it was directed by a poisonous
gas!”) and writer Shelley Gillen, who’s been involved in some of the previous Nightmares. The father is Matt Carmichael (the reasonably
hunky Joel Gretsch) and the nightmare he’s dealing with is that after he’s
spent months trying to raise his teenage daughter Lisa (Kaitlyn Bernard) as a
single father following the death of Lisa’s mom after a long battle with
cancer, Lisa is moping around the house and is reluctant to accept the
gymnastics scholarship offer from Southwestern Washington University (yes, this
is a Lifetime movie that’s set in Washington state so it can easily be “played”
by British Columbia, Canada) even though it’s quite generous: a free ride as
long as she keeps up both her gymnastics performance and her academic grades.
The casting directors for this film deserve credit for picking a girl to play
Lisa who looks credible as a gymnast — small, doll-like figure and small
breasts — though I suspect Kaitlyn Bernard had a double when the script called
for actual gymnastics performances since all the exercises she performs
perfectly are shown in long-shot. Alas, Lisa falls into the clutches of Vanessa
(Jessica Lowndes), who in an opening prologue is shown being released from a
mental institution for the criminally insane, where she was incarcerated for
killing two people and nearly murdering a third, though her doctors have
pronounced her “cured” and therefore send her into the world, albeit with
understandable misgivings. Vanessa bribes Jim (Tom Stevens, a baby-faced hunk
with a bod to die for and the only other significant male character besides Lisa’s father), the student
whose work-study job includes making roommate assignments, to put Lisa with her
instead of her high-school friend and fellow gymnast Katie (Ellery Sprayberry),
and once she gets Lisa in her clutches she does a number on her resembling the
way Boris Karloff treated Susanna Foster in the 1944 Universal film The
Climax, an intriguing reversal of
Svengali in which Karloff played a
sinister hypnotist out not to raise a talentless girl to opera stardom but to
sabotage the career of a genuinely great singer.
Vanessa gives Lisa “dish” on
how the other girls on the fiercely competitive gymnastics team really feel about her and gets Lisa to break off her
former friendship with Katie. When the anxieties from Vanessa’s gossip start
getting to Lisa and affecting her performance on the mat, Vanessa starts giving
her drugs which she’s obtaining illegally from Jim — and within a couple of
acts Lisa is on the roller-coaster, needing drugs to stay awake and other drugs
to fall asleep (and missing English classes — Vanessa offers to cover for her
but the teacher catches on, realizes they’ve submitted identical papers and
flunks both of them for cheating).
Meanwhile we’ve seen dad get increasingly worried about his daughter’s downward
spiral and his own helplessness in pulling her from Vanessa’s orbit, and he’s
getting advice from Lisa’s high-school gymnastics coach Laney (Lucia Walters,
the obligatory African-American voice of reason in the dramatis personae, even though the body language she throws off in
Matt’s presence makes it seem like she would want to be the next Mrs.
Carmichael). Matt is also seeing an older woman whose significance in the story
doesn’t become clear until the very end, when Lisa has been turned in by Katie
— who saw her using drugs in the locker room — and ordered to report for a drug
test the next morning. Vanessa gives her vodka — unbeknownst to Lisa but
beknownst to us, she’s spiked it with pills — and talks the drunken, stoned
Lisa into writing a letter to her father that will sound like a suicide note.
The next morning Vanessa takes Lisa out to a wooded area near the campus and
puts her on a tightrope, tying a noose around her neck and tying the other end
to one of the trees from which the tightrope is suspended, so if Lisa falls off
the tightrope she will hang. Fortunately, Matt, Laney and the police arrive
just in time to rescue Lisa and arrest Vanessa, and Vanessa finally blurts out
the truth about her motive: she’s actually Lisa’s half-sister. Vanessa — or
“Amanda,” as her actual mom named her — was the product of an affair Matt
Carmichael had before his marriage with a ballerina who went crazy and
committed suicide when Matt dumped her.
That, at least, is what the woman’s
mother, who took in Amanda afterwards and changed her name to Vanessa, told
her; in fact Amanda/Vanessa’s real mother survived her suicide attempt and Matt
has been visiting her regularly in a mental institution — she’s the mystery
woman we’ve seen him with in several previous scenes. Matt tells Amanda/Vanessa
that, contrary to what her grandmother told her, he’d never given up hope of
finding his other daughter someday, but Vanessa’s trauma over her alleged
abandonment by both parents led her to single out students (including her
previous victim, a male named Chris) with athletic ability, seduce them
(figuratively or, in Chris’s case, literally), get them on drugs and ultimately
persuade them to kill themselves. A Father’s Nightmare is the stuff from which most Lifetime movies are
made but it’s done with an unusual sense of style; Vanessa’s villainy is kept
within real-world believability and Jessica Lowndes plays her in a
matter-of-fact way that makes her more sinister than a more openly florid
“psycho” performance would have. The burning looks Lowndes gives as Vanessa
hypnotizes Lisa into doing poorly on the gymnastics floor are marvelously subtle
pieces of acting, and director Sarin (who’s also his own cinematographer) puts
just enough of a shadow on her face to give us the point that she a) has a
hypnotic power over Lisa and b) is up to no good without wrenching us away from
realism. At the end Lisa is rescued, she’s allowed to continue at school with
no ongoing black marks against her, pill-dealer Jim is arrested and Vanessa is
shown cowering in a corner of a mental hospital, eagerly accepting a letter we
presume is from Matt. A Father’s Nightmare is better-than-average Lifetime fare, told with a quiet understatement
by director Sarin and writer Gillen that completely avoids the over-the-top
plotting and acting that have wrecked too many otherwise potentially
interesting Lifetime movies, and we even get a nice soft-core porn scene
between Tom Stevens and Jessica Lowndes in which we’re given a good view of one
of his nipples.
