After the relative quality of Identity Theft of a Cheerleader, Lifetime’s next program. The Twisted Son — originally shot under the working title Thicker Than Water until someone at Incendo Media and/or Lifetime realized just how overused that title was (imdb.com lists 129 theatrical features, shorts or series TV episodes called Thicker Than Water — including the one I remembered, a 1935 comedy starring Laurel and Hardy — some of which are stated as “in development”) and gave it a more “Lifetime-y” name — was at first a bit of a disappointment. As the story went on, though, it gained power and force, largely due to the women involved: director Caroline Labrèche (another woman who deserves bigger and better assignments than she’s likely to get), co-writer Andrea Stevens (her collaborator was a man, David Elver), and the actresses in the two leading female roles, Andrea Roth as former attorney Paige Decker and Katie Douglas as her teenage daughter Addie. The Twisted Son — a misnomer because it suggests Decker and her husband Nathan (Tygh Runyan, whom I loved as a hot, hunky Russian sailor in Kathryn Bigelow’s underrated K-19: The Widowmaker from 2002, but now he’s middle-aged, not that attractive anymore and, more disappointingly, he still hasn’t learned how to act) have had a kid who turns out to be a psycho (a trope Lifetime already pulled back in 1996, albeit with a daughter instead of a son, in a film called Terror in the Family in which the Psycho Daughter from Hell was played by someone who did rise from the ranks of Lifetime to big features and an Academy Award, Hilary Swank) — begins with Paige crawling through the undergrowth of a dense forest and finding an open grave containing the body of her son Zach (Jason Smiley) surrounded by white oblong objects with rounded edges that appear to be pills. Later Paige wakes up screaming and her husband, in bed with her, realizes that It Was All a Dream: Paige has once again had a recurring nightmare about her dead son.
At least it’s established early
on that Zach is really, most sincerely dead, so the psycho intruder who’s going
to come on the scene and disrupt the Deckers’ lives even more than they already
have been is not going to be
posing as the real Zach. The big problem with this movie is the horrible
performances given by the male
leads: Tygh Runyan delivers his lines in a flat monotone that makes it sound
like he just failed his acting-school audition, and as Brandon Wilson, the
psycho who’s going to sweet-talk his way into renting a room from the Deckers
and then make their lives hell, Eric Osborne attempts the sort of performance
Anthony Perkins shocked the world with in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho nearly half a century ago but way overdoes the mumbling taciturnicity and lack of
affect. Perkins got away with this not only because he had one of the greatest
directors of all time but because in all his previous films he’d played rather
nerdy but still sympathetic boy-next-door characters, and he was using his well-developed
chops in such roles to seem sweet, charming and utterly harmless until the
knife came out (literally) and he started stabbing people with it. Osborne is
cute enough (though, alas, costume designer Anie Fisette dressed him in tacky,
ill-fitting slacks that didn’t show off his basket and didn’t seem at all like
what 2019’s college students would be wearing) but, like Tygh Runyan, he shows
virtually no emotion with his voice, and after a while one begins to wonder
whether the monotone with which he delivers all his lines is a voice he’s
deliberately adopted to portray an understated psycho or he simply can’t act
any better than this. Brandon walks onto the action when he spots a flyer on a
bulletin board at the local college advertising the room the Deckers have
available to rent; he takes the flyer off the board so no one else can see it
and we next see him sitting on the stairs leading to the Deckers’ front porch
watching some earthworms amongst the Deckers’ front-lawn plants and flipping a
Zippo lighter (a pretty recherché prop
for a 2019 movie), looking ready to burn the earthworm to death when Paige
Decker comes out of the house to ask what he’s doing there.
When he tells her
he’s interested in renting their room — something Paige reluctantly agreed to
do because she was so overcome by Zach’s death she quit her job as an attorney
with a major law firm (though the partner that supervised her was so impressed
he’s holding the gig open any time she’s ready to return to it) and ever since
has been moping around town doing nothing, and though Nathan also has a good
job it’s not enough to cover their household expenses comfortably — she said
that because she has a teenage daughter she only wanted to rent to a woman
(actually about the one nasty thing Brandon could conceivably do to the Deckers
that isn’t on the table is
molesting Addie!) — but Brandon sweet-talks Paige into accepting him as a
tenant, saying it’ll only be for a week or two until he can find something else
and impressing her by telling her he’s majoring in botany, as did Paige’s late
son Zach. Once Brandon gets in he makes himself at home, cooking stunning
dinners for the Deckers and impressing both Decker parents with his humility
and thoughtfulness. The one person in the household who doesn’t buy into his act is Addie; she’s onto how “off” he
seems from the beginning (like Thelma Ritter’s character in All About
Eve, who “reads” Eve as a villainess well
before anyone else in the story does) and her mom’s solicitude towards Brandon
only adds to her alienation over the way mom has essentially started neglecting
her living daughter in her grief over her dead son. There’s an incident at a
neighborhood barbecue party in which Brandon plays ball with a young girl
(Raynnie Platz) on the edge of a swimming pool; he kicks the ball into the
pool, the girl goes in after it even though she can’t swim, and for quite a
long time Brandon watches impassively as she flails in the water until he
finally jumps in and saves her. Everybody else at the party thinks Brandon is a
hero, but Addie and her friend Kara Crawford (Kayla Henry) saw how Brandon
tricked the girl into going into the water in the first place and how long he
waited before he decided to save her.
They research him on social media and
find, through a search engine called “Spyder Finder,” that Brandon’s page on
“Face Bubble” (obviously Incendo Media didn’t want to risk having to pay
royalties to any real tech companies to use their names!) is only two years old
and he seems to have no online presence until then — so they do a reverse
visual-recognition search on him and discover that his real name is Chris
Crotty (I’m not sure about the last name because it was only spoken once, in
passing, but that’s what it sounded like), and when he was eight his parents
and six-year-old sister died in a house fire which was ruled accidental, but of
course we know better … Also, Brandon is accosted at college by a fellow
student who calls him “Chris” and remembers how they were in home room together
in grade school — and of course, this being a Lifetime movie, Brandon clubs him
unconscious and locks him in the trunk of his car, which Brandon sets fire to
and burns. We’ve already got the message not only that Brandon is not one to be
trifled with but that he’s particularly turned on by fire as a means of murder
— and he’s also got a few other tricks up his sleeve. Early on while Brandon is
serving the Deckers his latest great dinner (he tells them he grew up in foster
homes and learned to cook well hoping that would encourage his foster parents
to keep him and even adopt him, but they never did) Nathan has let it slip that
he’s deathly allergic to bees, and of course writers Elver and Stevens are
following the Chekhovian principle that if you introduce a pistol in act one,
it has to go off in act three. When the Deckers decide they’ve had enough of
Brandon and it’s time for him to move out, Brandon decides to kill Nathan by
trapping some bees in a jar, putting them to sleep with cigarette smoke (a
tactic Charles assured me is used by real apiarists), and leaving them in
Nathan’s car overnight so when he drives to work the bees will come to, start
stinging him and either kill him then and there or force him off the road into
a fatal accident. Only the wreckage of Nathan’s car is discovered in time to
get him to a hospital where he can be treated and his life saved.
Eventually
Brandon realizes that the jig is up and in the final confrontation he tells
Paige — who’s come home to find Brandon essentially holding Addie as a hostage
— that he had met Zach (the real one) in school and, seeing that Zach had
essentially everything he wanted
out of life, decided to move in on the Deckers and replace him when Zach died.
(The writers don’t come right out and say Brandon murdered Zach, but they did drop a hint earlier when one of Paige’s old friends
came up to her while she was at lunch with her ex-boss about possibly coming
back to work and said what a surprise it was when Zach died of a drug overdose
since he never seemed like the kind
of kid who’d do drugs, which certainly made it seem like Brandon did in Zach by
slipping him something in a large enough quantity to kill him.) The two of them
try to flee Brandon and eventually Paige is able to kill him by hosing him down
with some flammable liquid and setting him on fire, thereby getting rid of him
the way he got rid of his parents and his old school buddy who made the mistake
of recognizing and accosting him. Despite the weaknesses in the plot and the
casting of the male leads, The Twisted Son has a haunting quality because the women are so good and the overall
conception of the story is chilling — and director Labrèche drenches the whole
thing in as much Gothic atmosphere as she could conjure up from a modern-day
suburban setting. Though I’m not sure how much of the fault in the performances
of Runyan and Osborne is hers and how much is just that she couldn’t get more
than their limited talents could deliver, Labrèche also deserves credit for
excellent atmospherics and the quite good performances she gets from the actors
of her own gender.
