by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was a Lifetime “Ripped from the
Headlines” movie called The Neighbor in the Window, though it was somewhat different from most of the
ones we’ve seen lately in that, though it was based on a true story and a book
written by the person it really happened to, the real person, Kathie Truitt,
changed both her own name (to “Karen Morgan”) and the name of her victimizer
(to “Lisa Beasley”), and she also moved the story from Washington, D.C. (where
it actually happened) to Seattle. The story as it’s told in the movie (with its
rather clunky title, which kept reminding me of Fritz Lang’s noir classic The Woman in the Window; Truitt called her book False Victim, which I think would have been a better title as
well as being the official name of her stalker’s mental illness, “False Victim
Syndrome”) is that Karen Morgan (Jamie-Lynn Sigler), her husband Scott (Geoff
Gustafson, stocky, of medium height and with black hair instead of the tall,
lanky brown-haired “type” that usually gets cast as Lifetime’s innocent
husbands) and their grade-school age son Miles (Azriel Dalman) relocate from
Salt Lake City to Seattle when the engineering company Scott works for offers
him a promotion but requires him to move. They end up buying a large house on a
cul-de-sac but Karen is originally surprised that the previous owners not only
left a surprising amount of stuff behind, they hung dark black curtains over
the big picture windows in the living room, and she can’t imagine why they
would have denied themselves all that wonderful natural light.
Almost as soon
as they move in, the Morgans make two new friends among their neighbors, Lisa
Beasley (Jean Lyon) and Susie (Carmel Amit). Susie is cool and normal; Lisa is
anything but cool. She’s given to
spying on the Morgans from a vantage point on the top story of her own house
through which she can see into those big picture windows. She also has her own
son befriend Miles, and soon the two kids are happily playing together in the
big back yard the houses share, and Karen agrees to hire Lisa’s older child, a
daughter named Allie (Hannah Zirkey) whom Lisa describes as “13, going on 40,”
a chance to earn some extra money baby-sitting Miles. Only the budding
friendship begins to go haywire when Lisa, Karen and Susie go shopping
together, Karen buys a short red dress on Lisa’s advice — and the next day,
when they have a meeting with the officials at the prestigious and ridiculously
named Dorothy Peacock Elementary School where both boys will be attending, Lisa
wears an identical (though larger because she takes a bigger size) red dress
and Karen is miffed. The style-swiping gets worse when Karen makes a tearful
confession to Lisa one night that the silver necklace she wears is a gift from
her husband to commemorate their earlier child, Rose, who died one month after
she was born of sudden infant death syndrome — whereupon Lisa says that she,
too, had a child who died of SIDS. The next time Karen sees Lisa, Lisa is
wearing exactly the same necklace with exactly the same design. At a bit
outdoor cookout in that common back yard, Lisa’s husband Dan — a good-natured schlub (the actor who plays him, Alistair Abell, looks like
the guy you would have called 30 years ago if you couldn’t get Danny DeVito)
who’s obviously exasperated by the trouble his wife has caused him over the
years — tells Karen’s husband Scott that it was Lisa’s sister, not Lisa
herself, who lost a child to SIDS. Karen confronts Lisa and Lisa tells her that
she’s just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease — she even shows Lisa a
little notebook with various colored tags sticking from some of the pages,
ostensibly so she can remember medical appointments — and that’s why she
misremembered having had a child with SIDS herself because Parkinson’s gets you
confused about the details.
Lisa also shows up at the Morgans’ place on
Hallowe’en when Scott Morgan is on duty to distribute candy to the
trick-or-treaters, wearing a skin-tight black pants and matching shirt with a big
oval-shaped hole in the middle of the front of the shirt so it shows off the
wearer’s cleavage. The only other time I’ve seen this peculiar garment was on
the ghastly March 21, 2016 show on Fox, The Passion, where it was worn by Trisha Yearwood — an even
odder costume than it was here given that she was supposed to be playing Mary,
the Virgin Mother of God, while Jenn Lyon here is playing a typical nosy
neighbor who’s hoping to screw up the Morgans’ marriage by seducing Scott, or
at least by making enough of a play for him that she can later claim he came on to her. The breaking point comes when Lisa asks Karen to lend her $5,000,
saying she and her husband Dan need the money immediately because Dan has lost
his job. Karen says no, and Lisa basically declares war, dragging her son out
of the Morgan home where he’d been playing with Miles and cutting off contact
between the two families. Lisa also makes an anonymous phone call to the
principal of Dorothy Peacock Elementary, claiming that the Morgans are neglecting
their son Miles (ya remember Miles?)
and costing Karen her cherished volunteer stint reading to the kids in her
son’s class. Karen sees Lisa in the parking lot of Dorothy Peacock — driving a
silver Mercedes identical to her own, which since she’s just bought it blows
the credibility of Lisa having told her that she and her husband were broke —
and Karen angrily confronts Lisa with Lisa’s son present. Lisa goes to court
and swears out a restraining order against Karen — which, among other things,
means Miles can no longer play in that big cool backyard for reasons neither
Karen nor his dad Scott bother to explain to him. Lisa also fills the Web page
of the real-estate company Karen has gone back to work for — she got bored
hanging around the house all day and figured Miles was old enough she could go
back to work — with negative reviews of Karen’s performance, so Karen’s
otherwise sympathetic boss is forced to give her a temporary layoff.
The film
reaches its climax when Karen goes out to get her family fast food, only as
she’s coming home — and driving unusually slowly because she’s got soft drinks
in the car and doesn’t want them to spill — Lisa hurls herself in front of
Karen’s car and claims that Karen deliberately tried to run her over. Karen is
arrested and charged with attempted murder — Karen is confident that her other neighbor Susie (ya remember Susie?), who was watching the whole thing from her window, can exonerate her — but Susie refuses to
testify, obviously because she
doesn’t want to get on Lisa’s bad side and make herself the next subject of
Lisa’s abuse. The case goes to trial with a peculiar courtroom procedure;
though Karen is being charged with a crime, and therefore we would expect her
to be prosecuted by an assistant district attorney who would make his opening
statement first and go first with his witnesses, including Lisa, what we see is
more like a civil case, with the prosecutor identified as Lisa’s (not the state’s!) attorney and getting to make his
opening statement and examine the witnesses after Karen’s lawyer do so. The case seems to be running
against Karen until Lisa’s daughter Allie refuses to lie under oath for her
mom: she tells them that she and Lisa had been waiting outside the Morgans’
home for 20 minutes until Karen returned so Lisa could throw herself under
Karen’s car and claim Karen tried to run her over. Karen gets acquitted but
they can’t do anything about Lisa — the police won’t prosecute her (even though
she perjured herself in the trial) and she’s still living in That House — so at the end the Morgans
move out and the final shot is of Lisa, still looking out that window, watching
the house’s new owners move in and plotting her campaign against them.
There was a 10-minute mini-documentary after the
fiction film explaining the history of anti-stalking legislation — no such laws
existed until the early 1980’s (before that cops told people that they couldn’t
do anything about people who followed them around and harassed them until they
physically struck them), when my state, California, passed the first one — and
also the premises of “false victim syndrome,” a characteristic mental illness
of borderline personalities who invent elaborate histories of their own
victimization and constantly suck for pity to extract favors (including money)
from the people around them. I couldn’t help but wonder if this is part of
Donald Trump’s mental illness — no matter how many good things happen to him
(including his recent acquittal in the impeachment trial because all but one
Republican Senator stood loyal to him rather than to the Constitution), Trump can’t let go of his sense that
he is a victim, as witness the
public pity party he staged to celebrate his acquittal and his adding three
more heads to the pikes of all the people he feels have “wronged” him. (That
was the metaphor an unnamed Trump White House associate used to communicate a
warning to any wavering Republican Senators that “their heads would be on a
pike” if they had the lèse-majesté
to vote against Trump.) I had begun to make that connection even during the
movie — when Susie refused to testify for Karen I thought, “Just like a
Republican Senator!” — and though the one weakness I found in the story was
that nobody in it was fully honest with each other (in particular, Karen never
told anybody in the story,
including her husband and their son, that Lisa’s campaign against them really
started when Karen refused to give her $5,000), otherwise this was a marvelous
movie, chillingly directed by Menhai Huda, with a tough, no-nonsense script by Karen
Stillman and excellent performances from the two female leads.
