Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” feature was called Abducted on Air, though the working title was The Lead, and it was written by Barbara Kymlicka (whom I’ve jokingly called “Barbara Cum-Licker” because virtually all her screenplays, including this one, deal with nubile young women having sex with older men for money, power or status) and directed by Philippe Gagnon. The central character is Sasha Bruder (Kim Shaw), a reporter for Cable 4 TV News — just where this story takes place is a bit of a mystery, since a line of dialogue early on identifies it as Cleveland but a later sign outside a law-enforcement building says “State of Okla.” Bruder is young, super-ambitious and jealous of the station’s lead investigative reporter, Dianne Baldwin (Perrey Reeves, top-billed), who gets the big nasty crime stories (including one on a series of home-invasion robberies) that lead the newscasts and Sasha’s stories, if they air at all, are relegated to the tail end of Cable 4’s schedule. The title is a misnomer since Sasha isn’t actually abducted, on air or otherwise; instead she and her former journalism teacher, Aidan Ferguson (Gord Rand), plotted to fake her kidnapping as she was alone in the Cable 4 studios after hours recording the intro to her latest story about community activists trying to save an old building from demolition. The gimmick was that she would usher her assistant Alex Peterson (Marc Bendavid), who has a big-time crush on her (he actually got the chance to have sex with her, but after one time she decided she didn’t want to go there again), out of the building and then Aidan would disguise himself in the obligatory Lifetime crook’s uniform — a black hoodie and black ski mask — “kidnap” her and then hide her out for a few days before she would reappear, having supposedly “escaped” from her (alleged) captors.
For the first hour or so it seemed like Kymlicka and Gagnon were going the route of Alfred Hitchcock — who after his early 1930 British film Murder! carefully avoided whodunits and plots which turned on surprise; instead Hitchcock let the audience in early on who the heroes were, who the villains were and what the dastardly plot was, and made the suspense out of when the characters would find out and what would happen to them when they did. That could have been the basis for an interesting film, especially since Kymlicka and Gagnon evoked not only Hitchcock comparisons but Billy Wilder ones as well: the whole concept of a journalist stuck in a small-time job and willing to do anything, no matter how unscrupulous, to break into the big-time is the plot of Wilder’s greatest film, Ace in the Hole, and the growing antagonism between Sasha and Aidan as their plot unravels and gets in the way of their physical relationship made me think, “Ah, it’s Double Indemnity, only with journalism instead of insurance.” Kymlicka also gives us some formidable suspects as the scheme starts going south, including Aidan’s icy-cold wife Jocelyn (Kristin Booth) — who’s also the daughter of the president of the college where Aidan teaches (apparently at some point Kymlicka had read or seen Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) — and Sasha’s crush object Alex, whom at one point she tries to frame for the crime by leaving the handkerchief with which she was gagged during the “kidnapping” in his home and dripping blood (which she extracts by cutting open the palm of her hand — ouch!) on his clothes, leading to his arrest for the crime.
She even drops a
hint that the reason Diane Baldwin is doing Sasha out of all the big stories is
that she’s having an affair with
the station’s news director, Gavin (Bruce Dinsmore), which suggests that in the
age of #MeToo Sasha would have done better simply to report Gavin as a sexual predator
to his higher-ups and get him denounced by the modern-day Sex Police and driven
out of his job, with Diane as collateral damage, instead of going through all
the trouble of faking her own kidnapping. Another big issue is that Aidan is
motivated not only by his dick but his literary career; he’s already published
one book (we’re not told whether it was nonfiction or fiction) but it flopped,
and he sees Sasha’s “abduction” story as having best-seller written all over it
— though Sasha is double-crossing him by negotiating for the rights with
another author. Sasha also has a father who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s or
some other sort of age-related dementia, and one of the few things that reminds
him he has a daughter is an old
home-movie videotape, which Sasha had transferred to DVD, of Sasha as a child
(played by Maya Fellen) holding a rubber toy replica of an ice-cream cone to
her mouth and pretending it’s a TV microphone and she’s recording an intro to a
TV news story — indicating that a successful TV reporter is the only thing Sasha has ever wanted to be in her life.
Sasha
starts receiving threatening notes and then gets left some of the accoutrements of the “crime” she and Aidan faked, including the
rope she was tied with covered in still-damp blood, and for a long time
Kymlicka leads us up the garden path and makes us think Aidan’s wife Jocelyn,
who’s previously cleaned up the messes he’s got himself into with other affairs
with current or former students, is behind the harassment as part of her campaign
to force Sasha to confess and win back her errant husband’s affections. Instead
the payoff is that the real
stalker is [spoiler alert!] Diane
Baldwin, who faked being victimized by a home-invasion — she left blood around
her house and left her furniture in disarray to make it look like she’d been
killed by one of the co-conspirators and then her body had been taken away, but
really she’d caught on to inconsistencies in the recorded video of the
“kidnapping,” had somehow deduced the truth and in a final scene evocative of
Edward Bryant’s science-fiction story “The 10:00 Report Is Brought to You By …
” (a dark tale about rival TV news shows arranging for real crimes to be
committed so they can report “exclusive” stories on them, published in Harlan
Ellison’s 1972 anthology Again, Dangerous Visions) and the 1976 movie Network (which I’ve long suspected was itself influenced by
Bryant’s story), Sasha is sent to the local police station to cover the arrest
of her kidnapper — only to find that Diane is also there and the story she’s
been sent to “cover” is her own arrest.
Abducted on Air is a good movie that had the potential to be even
better; if Barbara Kymlicka had stuck to the Hitchcockian plot construction she
began with and not started dragging traditional Lifetime formula elements into
it, and also if casting associate Kalene Osborne (whose post-script affiliation
is not “C.S.A.” but “C.D.C.,” which of course led me to joke, “So instead of
being cast by the Confederate States of America, this film was cast by the
Centers for Disease Control!”) had come up with the hot, hunky actor we usually
expect to play a Lifetime villain. Instead both the men in Sasha’s life are played by boring-looking
milquetoasts, and Gord Rand and Marc Bendavid look enough alike one can imagine
Rand as Bendavid’s older (and clean-shaven) brother. Also we could have used
some Christine Conradtian backstory on What Made Sasha Run — perhaps a
flashback to her childhood that showed the young Sasha obsessively watching TV
news and wanting to be one of Those People. But even as it stands Abducted
on Air is a better-than-average Lifetime
film, easily the best Barbara Kymlicka-written film I’ve seen, since here she’s
been able to harness her penchant for stories about sexually manipulative young
women getting in over their heads and take it to more sinister and dramatically
more complex territory than usual for her — and Gagnon and a solidly
professional cast do justice to Kymlicka’s script even though I’ve seen better
performances by other actresses as Lifetime’s nubile young girl psychos than
the one Kim Shaw gives here.
