by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched what turned out to be an intriguing bigamy double
bill on Lifetime, the “premiere” of something called My Husband’s Secret Wife followed by (stop me if you’ve heard this before) My
Husband’s Double Life. My Husband’s Secret Wife was a not-bad thriller in which at the beginning artist Avery Stinson
(Helena Mattsson) is accosted in a department store where she’s with her
pre-pubescent son Jack (Ethan J. and Oliver Green), whom she’s raised as a
single mom since the death of her husband Jesse in a roadside accident a few
years earlier. The figure that accosts her is dressed in a black hoodie and
matching pants and is wearing a smiley-face mask, and it attempts to kidnap her
son but is thwarted by the store’s security guard. In the process, however,
Avery meets Alex (Josh Kelly), a hunky guy who seems to be the man of her
dreams — they have a whirlwind courtship and within two months they’ve got
married. Only a mysterious woman is stalking them at the wedding and is noticed
by Avery’s sister Cat (Sofia Mattsson), who’s dating Avery’s gallery assistant
Hugh (Brock Harris, who for my money was even more drop-dead gorgeous than Josh
Kelly). Alas, Alex is a big-time attorney who’s often leaving town on “business
trips” which turn out to be trysts with the mystery woman, Melanie (Briana
Evigan), who is actually Alex’s previous wife. In a quite nicely written bit of
pathos by Catherine Hurd, Tamar Halpern and Dave Hickey that seems to be
setting up Melanie as a Christine Conradt-esque figure of real complexity,
Melanie tells Avery that the reason Alex married her without bothering to
divorce Melanie first was that Avery had the one thing Melanie hadn’t been able
to give him — a child.
Alas, for the rest of the movie Melanie becomes a
single-minded, revenge-driven maniac as she stalks the other principals and
ultimately corners Hugh in the gallery. At first she comes on to him but then,
when he threatens to call the police on her (like so many movie idiots, he tells her he’s going to do that instead of just slipping
out of the space and then doing so out of her earshot), she grabs an artist’s
hammer and clubs him over the head with it, killing him. (It’s disappointing,
to say the least, to lose the movie’s hottest male so early.) It all ends in a
climax at a mountain cabin (not another mountain cabin — though at least these writers make it clear that one
reason they set the climax at a mountain cabin is that they wanted a location
so remote the heroine would be cut off from cell-phone service) in which
Melanie has taken Jack. Avery’s sister Cat has found out the location and
called the police (she remembers the location because Avery’s and Alex’s wedding
took place there) and, after the writers and director Tamar Halpern have kept
us in legitimate suspense over whether Alex is an innocent victim of Melanie’s
madness (his excuse to Avery for their bigamous marriage is she disappeared on
him and he tried to locate her so he could divorce her) or a participant in her
plot, in the last act the truth emerges: Alex was in on the plot from the get-go. Their first idea was
simply to kidnap Jack and raise him as his and Melanie’s own, but when that
didn’t happen his Plan B was to romance Avery until he could do a legitimate
second-parent adoption of Jack, then kill Avery and raise Jack with Melanie. My
Husband’s Secret Life is actually a pretty
good Lifetime thriller, with huge gaps in the credibility department but
decently acted and quite capably directed by Halpern, even though he and his
writing colleagues have a lot to answer for in the plot holes of their script!
