by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
There were a couple of
Lifetime movies I wanted to watch last night, a “premiere” called Her Secret
Family Killer (a title that just seems
to scream “Lifetime,” though the working title was DNA Killer — which would have suggested, at least to me, a
murderer who was intent on eliminating an entire family one by one) and a
repeat showing of the previous night’s “premiere,” You Can’t Take My
Daughter. Her Secret Family
Killer takes place in a suburban
community in Washington state — our friend Garry was over to watch it with us
and, since he’s lived there, he recognized some of the locations, including
Whidbey Island, though I suspect that was just second-unit footage and the
studio work was done across the border in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
(A lot of Lifetime movies take
place in the Pacific Northwest so they can shoot in Vancouver and take
advantage of Vancouver’s studio infrastructure as well as the cheaper Canadian
salaries — probably cheaper because, among other things, Canadian employers
don’t have to pay for their employees’ health care.) It’s a typically messy
Lifetime story, written by Brooke Purdy and directed by Lisa France (she gets
some good suspense moments into it but this is not a Lifetime movie that is going to advance the
cause of women directors in Hollywood; she’s not at the level of Christine
Conradt or Vanessa Parise), in which the central character is Sarah (Brooke
Nevin), who’s inherited an ice-cream shop from her Aunt Windy (Pamela Roylance)
— though Aunt Windy is still alive and periodically inserts herself into the
action to give April and us important exposition about their family and who’s
related to whom.
April has a husband named Will (Darin Brooks) and they have a
friend named Ian (Gustavo Escobar) who’s skeptical when Will orders an
ancestry.com (or whatever they call it here) DNA test for Sarah as a birthday
present. The plot kicks off when Sarah’s friend Victoria (Carmen Moreno)
suddenly disappears and is found a day later, dead, in the local woods. The
cops do a test for any other person’s DNA on the corpse and find Sarah’s —
which leads them to conclude either that Sarah herself is the killer or that
the murderer is someone with virtually identical DNA to hers. At this point I
was guessing that Brooke Purdy was going to pull the old gimmick of having the
killer be an identical twin of Sarah’s who was raised somewhere else and of
whose existence Sarah had no idea. As it turns out, Sarah does have a previously unknown sibling, Lyle (David
Crittenden), but since he’s only a half-brother (same father, but his mom was a
woman Sarah’s dad had an affair with before he married Sarah’s mother) his DNA
isn’t close enough for him to be the match. The cops ultimately arrest Sarah’s full brother Matt —
the one she and we did know
about (and he’s played by a really cute actor who regrettably isn’t identified
on imdb.com) — for murdering not only Victoria but also Sarah’s cousin April
Baxter (Diora Baird), who had come to town (wherever “town” is in this movie)
to help out at the ice-cream parlor even though there was a lot of joking
around about how she was threatening the survival of the business by eating too
much of the product.
Brooke Purdy throws too many characters at us and has a
hard time keeping us up on who’s related to whom, and the whole thing creaks
along to an ending in which the real killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Roger (Matt Shevin), the tall, hunky, butch cop in
charge of the investigation. Roger, it turns out, was the husband of Victoria,
and while he’s posed as a man who both as a grieving husband and a cop wants to find his wife’s killer (wouldn’t a real police
department have pulled him off the investigation because of his conflict of interest? Or does this
little community in Washington state not have enough police officers to do that?), he really
murdered his wife because she was having an affair with another man and wanted
to leave him. Then he killed April because she stumbled on a key piece of
evidence and started putting two and two together, and at the end of the movie
he’s stalking Sarah through her home and her main concerns are not only keeping
herself alive but keeping her and Will’s pre-pubescent daughter from stumbling
onto Roger stalking her and getting herself added to the body count too. Eventually April gets
Roger’s gun away from him, though this is one Lifetime movie in which the
killer is taken alive instead of shot either by his vengeful would-be victim or
the non-involved cops. Her Secret Family Killer is a clever “take” on the use of DNA in
crime-solving — Roger tricked Victoria into getting Sarah to take the DNA test
and then got a copy of her report as well as some of her fluids so he could plant them on Victoria’s body and thus frame her in a
high-tech manner — but just writing the above synopsis has made me even more
aware than I was while actually watching the movie what a preposterous plot device
this is. The movie is decently acted and the direction is O.K., but the script
seems to be more the work of a writer ticking off each Lifetime plot cliché off
a checklist as she incorporates it — and casting director Paul Ruddy followed
Lifetime traditions in casting the hunkiest guy in the movie as the villain
(though the unnamed actor playing Matt gives Matt Shevin serious competition in
the looks department, even though he’s twink-ish instead of butch).
