by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched last night’s Lifetime movie, which was
billed as a “Premiere” even though the copyright date was 2019 rather than 2020
and it’s been out long enough imdb.com not only had a page on it (which they hadn’t for the previous night’s Lifetime movie, Psycho
Yoga Instructor) but the page contained a
review from someone who’d never heard the term “gaslighting” before and didn’t
realize it had nothing to do with actually burning anything down. The film is
called Is My Daughter Really Dead?
and centers around the Whitmore family: husband Layne (Matthew Pohlkamp), wife
Olivia (Zoë McClellan), and teenage daughter Hannah (Stevie Lynn Jones). The
husband has some sort of well-paying job, though writers Colin Edward Lawrence
(who also directed) and Erin Murphy West never bother to tell us what it is,
and he’s put up the seed capital for his wife to open an art gallery. They were
formerly living in Seattle but have since moved to the more rural town in
Washington state where Layne grew up to try to save their marriage. Their
marriage is on the rocks because Layne had an affair with another woman
—Lawrence and West don’t tell us who until the film is almost over, but Charles
guessed her identity almost immediately and the filmmakers ultimately took their
story exactly where he’d said they would.
For the first half-hour Is
My Daughter Really Dead? is actually a
surprisingly good movie about the breakup of a marriage and the bitterness of
daughter Hannah, who clearly always liked her dad better than her mom, over the
way mom has sent her packing. Hannah only gets more bitter when her dad is
killed in a car crash — at least that’s what she, her mom and we are told — and
she’s clearly blaming her mom for her dad’s death. Just then an
African-American single mom, Mary Cooper (Stephanie Charles), and her daughter
Sydney (Ryan Madison), move in next door and the plot really begins to boil. The Coopers invite Olivia and Hannah
to join them on a weekend camping trip; Olivia begs off because she has to get
her gallery ready for its grand opening, but Hannah goes — only when Olivia
tries to call her daughter during the weekend her calls go straight to
voicemail, and when the Coopers return they tell Olivia they took the trip
alone after Hannah didn’t show. Olivia tries to report her daughter to the
police as missing but the detective she tries to report it to, Bruce Chambers
(Chris Dougherty), takes her not
to the police station but to the live-work space of his wife, therapist Lisa
Chambers (Samantha Colburn), who tells Olivia she missed their therapy
appointment. Olivia protests that it’s her daughter who had the appointment, not her, but Lisa not only
insists on seeing Olivia professionally, she tells her both her ex-husband and their daughter were killed in the
car crash and she’s having a serious case of dissociation over her denial that
her daughter is dead.
A frantic Olivia looks for proof that Hannah is still
alive — or at least was after her
husband was killed — and her only allies are Jack Daly (Mike Erwin), an artist
who was exhibiting at her gallery and was attracted to her romantically (Layne
accused Olivia of having an affair with Jack, obviously to defend himself
against her charges of infidelity; they weren’t, but it increased his
bitterness against his wife); and Genevieve, a caterer Olivia had hired to
provide food for her gallery opening and saw Hannah alive after her dad died
when she went to the gallery to present Olivia her bill — only as soon as
Genevieve calls Olivia to tell her she’ll be willing to tell the cops she saw
Hannah after her dad’s accident, a mysterious stranger in a black hoodie and
gloves (so you can’t tell what gender or race they are) stabs her, presumably to death, though we don’t see the
body afterwards and are never told whether the police recovered it. The climax
occurs when Olivia thinks of looking for Hannah at her ex-husband’s cabin
outside Seattle — not another
Lifetime movie whose climax takes place at a mountain cabin! And at least this
one has cell-phone reception (previously Lifetime writers set their climaxes at
mountain cabins so the characters would be out of cell-phone range and
therefore couldn’t call the police) — where Olivia has gone but made the
mistake of asking Mary Cooper to drive her. Spoiler alert [though Charles had guessed it almost an hour and a
half’s worth of running time earlier, no fool he) Mary Cooper is the woman her
husband was having an affair with. What’s more, Layne Whitmore didn’t die at
all — the body was burned beyond recognition and was actually that of a
hitchhiker he’d picked up along the way — and once Layne crawled out from under
the wreckage of his car he hatched a plot to hide himself and Hannah at the
cabin and enlist the aid of Mary, Bruce and Lisa to make it look like Olivia
was crazy and get her incarcerated in a mental institution. Only now that
Olivia has seen him alive, he and Mary determine they’ll have to kill her and
kill Hannah for good measure — even though Layne’s original purpose was to
drive his wife crazy so his daughter would accept Mary Cooper as her new mom.
Bruce Chambers — who is, after all, a police officer — shoots both Layne and
Mary, leaving Hannah back with her mom, Sydney (who wasn’t a part of her
mother’s machinations, though mom did get her to lie that Hannah hadn’t been on their camping trip) back in
Seattle with an aunt willing to raise her, Bruce and Lisa Chambers in prison
(presumably awaiting trial for conspiracy to commit murder) and Olivia and Jack
sucking face in the gallery in a postlude set “Four Months Later.” Though the
script for this movie specifically used the term “gaslighting” — which comes
from the two film versions of Patrick Hamilton’s play Angel Street, in 1939 in Britain with Diana Wynyard and Anton
Walbrook and far more famously five years later in Hollywood with Ingrid
Bergman and Charles Boyer, about a woman wooed and then deliberately driven
crazy by a husband who married her only to get the fortune in stolen
merchandise hidden in her house — the plot against Olivia involves so many
people it seemed more like Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 film The Lady
Vanishes than like Gaslight to me. Is My Daughter Really Dead? is an example of a Lifetime film that’s really
trying to be above the channel’s norm, but
the “surprise” twists are too obvious and Lawrence really isn’t a good enough
suspense director to make a story like this work as well as Hitchcock or
Gaslight director George Cukor did. Indeed,
though this was a more “respectable” production and quite a bit better cast
(though one wonders why casting director Ricki Master picked three actors for
the male leads who look quite a bit alike), Psycho Yoga Instructor was better fun even though (or maybe
because) it was so much sleazier!
