by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s two Lifetime movies were My Nightmare
Landlord and Baby Monitor Murders, and though both were very much to the Lifetime
“pussies in peril” (the phrase is New York Times critic Maureen Dowd’s) formula, My
Nightmare Landlord was actually quite good.
It was a product of The Asylum — a company that usually does ripoff movies of
major-budget productions based either on public-domain stories (they rushed
their own versions of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars ahead of the major versions of those stories by
Spielberg and Disney, respectively) or concepts so obvious they couldn’t be
copyrighted (they did a movie about people chasing ghosts called Ghosthunters and one about street racers called The
Fast and the Fierce). This time writer
Naomi L. Selfman and director Dylan Vox, both names new to me, came up with an
“original” story in which Lydia Shaw (Caroline Harris) is a college student who
has a work-study job at the school library (though it has a children’s section
and services the general public as well; Charles questioned this but I figured
the town it was in was so small the city government had decided not to maintain
their own library but to contract with the university so non-affiliated people
could use the library as well). She’s barely hanging on both to her academic
career — her faculty advisor, Professor Moodley (Harwood Gordon) keeps
rejecting her suggestions for papers on the ground that her topic is too broad
and she needs to narrow her focus — and her job, at least in part because she’s
also screwed up her personal life. She was living with a white boyfriend named
Tim (Spencer Belko) who spent his spare time drinking, hanging out in bars and
cruising other women, and he’s become so abusive she’s determined to leave him
even though it will make her homeless and her only recourse is to sleep on the
couch of her best friend Kaylee (Sinéad D’arcy) until she finds a place. She almost gets one in an apartment building run by a
middle-aged Black woman when Tim, who’s followed her there, shows up, makes a
scene and leads the Black manager to say, “This is a quiet building, we don’t
need that kind of trouble here,” and tear up the draft lease.
She finally seems
to luck out at another building run by a young, hunky white guy, Drew (Ignacyo
Matynia), whom we first see topless as he’s in the middle of doing his own
renovations on the building. The fact that Ignacyo Marynia is drop-dead
gorgeous and superficially charming ought to be the dead giveaway that he’s not
to be trusted — and the fact that the apartment Drew is showing Lydia is fully
furnished and decorated because the woman who was living there before her just
moved out and abandoned everything (Drew said it was to marry a rich guy and
move in with him, but we think,
“Yeah, right; he’s probably got
her buried in his crawl space, or maybe his basement”) also ought to be a warning sign. Nonetheless, and despite
the fact that she needs the apartment at all because she’s just left an abusive
boyfriend who’s still stalking her (which I would think would make her more aware of the dangers of falling for a new guy), she
naïvely takes Drew at face value. At face value he’s a charming man who’s
literary (on finding out Lydia is an English major he starts spouting Hemingway
trivia and expressing his desire to take a vacation to Italy and take her to
Harry’s Bar from The Sun Also Rises)
and a fun companion. But he also has her apartment bugged so he can snoop on
her with video cameras connected to his laptop (including watching her in her
bathtub, though both she and he take bubble baths so director Vox can avoid
showing “naughty bits” — this movie has more bubble-bath scenes than anything
made since the heyday of Jayne Mansfield), and when she innocently gives him her
student paper and her renewal application for her financial aid, he doesn’t
mail the aid application and somehow opens the envelope with a paper and keeps
her cover sheet but substitutes an already published paper he downloaded online
— which leads her to be accused of plagiarism and get threatened with being
thrown out of the university.
He also goes into a hissy-fit when he sees Lydia
with her teacher’s assistant Brad (André Beyer), a reasonably attractive Black
man we find ourselves thinking she should be dating if only because she’s had rotten luck with white guys and it
would seem to make sense for her to pick one of her own. Drew steals Lydia’s
cell phone, uses it to send a text to Brad accusing him of sexual harassment
and breaking off further contact, and then drops the phone into the water dish
of Lydia’s cat Pumpkin so she’ll have to replace it and won’t be able to read
the texts Drew sent impersonating her. The missing phone also gets Lydia fired
from her library job when she shows up late because she didn’t get the text her
boss, Lucia (Lucy Bowyer), sent rescheduling her an hour early. Also in the
building is a middle-aged woman named Helen (Willow Hale) who’s suffering from
some sort of age-related dementia —when we first meet her she’s trying to get
into Lydia’s apartment, thinking it’s her own, and I joked, “Ah! It’s Joe Biden
in drag!” — and whom Drew murders when she rats him out to Lydia, saying that
he’s used his pass key to let himself in her apartment any time he feels like
it. It ends with Drew binding Lydia and threatening to drown her in a bathtub
(not another bathtub scene!) when
the police respond to an incomplete 911 call and her friend Kaylee (ya remember
Kaylee?) clues them to what’s
going on and rescues her in time. The movie ends happily — Lydia gets her
financial aid, her professor gets her real (and genuinely original) paper and gives her the paid internship she
was hoping for so she won’t have to work at the library anymore, and Lydia and
Kaylee lay plans to find their own apartment together. “Ah!” I joked. “Boy
meets girl, boy turns out to be psycho, girl gets girl.”
Though My
Nightmare Landlord isn’t that much of a
departure from the usual Lifetime clichés, it’s actually quite well done: more
than I do in most of these productions, I really identified with Lydia. It
helps that both the leads are
quite good actors: Caroline Harris is warm and human enough that we really
identify with her and care about her plight, and Ignacyo Matynia manages to
capture the complexity of his character, genuinely attractive, appealing and
fun to be with when that bit of glare-ice in his head isn’t sending him
skidding off the road into the possessive mania of the crazed stalker. He even
manages to sound genuinely sorry in the final scene that he’s going to “have”
to kill the woman he thought he was in love with, the woman he thought would
make him complete. There’ve been a handful of performances over the years in
which great actors played characters who did horrible things to women but
managed even at the height of their murderous manias to remain charming — Boris
Karloff in The Mummy (1932);
Lionel Atwill in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933); John Carradine in Bluebeard (1944); Anthony Perkins in Psycho (1960) — and though Matynia may not be in that exalted company it’s clear he’s managed the rare
double balance of being charming and evil at the same time. Certainly it’s a
lot easier in this film than in some of Lifetime’s other, similarly plotted
productions to understand why the woman is genuinely attracted to him — even
though, in one scene Naomi Selfman seems to have carefully constructed to keep
Lydia from opening herself in the last and most irrevocable way to Drew (at
least short of him killing her!), he has them make out and get horny but she
draws back from the actual sex act … so at least she won’t have that psychological burden to worry about later. (Still, I
can’t help but think how this movie might have worked if Lydia and Drew not
only had had sex, but she’d got pregnant from it; it’s tempting to imagine the
sequel that could have generated and the moral dilemma it would have put her
in: have an abortion or raise her psycho ex’s child?)
Charles thought there was
a theatrical movie from the late 1980’s or early 1990’s that had used the situation
of a monster landlord or property manager putting the moves on a tenant and
freaking out and making her life miserable when she turned him down — I had
thought he was thinking of Pacific Heights (a film from 1991 Charles and I had seen together, though in that one
it was the tenant from hell,
Michael Keaton, driving crazy the people he rents a room from, Matthew Modine
and Melanie Griffith) but the film he ultimately ran down was called Sliver, it was made in 1993 and starred Sharon Stone,
William Baldwin and Tom Berenger in a story of (as imdb.com synopsized it) “a
woman moves into an exclusive New York City apartment building, which she soon
discovers houses tenants with all manner of shocking secrets.” It was based on
a book by Ira Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Boys from Brazil, and doesn’t really sound that much like My
Nightmare Landlord (the title of Sliver comes from the film’s setting, one of those tall but
ultra-narrow buildings in New York City that were designed to fit a weirdly shaped
lot that had somehow become available), but it’s indicative of how obvious
ideas get recycled throughout cinema history. Still, My Nightmare
Landlord (despite its title, which seems to
be working too hard to be frightening) has a rare level of humanity and
emotional complexity that sets it more than a bit above the Lifetime norm.
