by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 8 p.m. I watched an unusually good Lifetime
movie, billed as a “Premiere” and so new
that, for the second week in a row, imdb.com didn’t have a page on it yet and I
had to filter through other sources on the Internet (particularly a site called
https://meaww.com)
and frantically scribble down as many names as I could from the opening credits
to figure out whom to attribute the quite remarkable quality of this film. It
was called — or at least Lifetime called it — Their Killer Affair, and they promoted it with a trailer that suggested
a man and a woman, each married to others, would get together and go on a
Bonnie-and-Clyde style criminal rampage. The promo even hinted that the male
half of this couple was Bisexual, since he was described as being partnered
with someone named “Max” — though in the movie itself “Max” turns out to be a
woman, police detective Maxine Peyton of the decidedly fictional town of
Brixton, California. In the opening scene she and her police partner, Nick
Curtis (Brandon Beemer), are sent to investigate the murder of someone who’s
been hanged and choked to death in a trailer in what’s obviously been staged to
look like an S/M scene gone terribly wrong.
The body turns out to be that of a
prominent local plastic surgeon who had a “thing” for erotic asphyxiation and,
since his wife wasn’t willing to choke him as part of sex, he joined a Web site
called “Adelina Lilly” (based on the real-life cheaters’ Web site “Ashley
Madison,” which was exposed a few years ago when anonymous hackers downloaded
and posted the real identities of their users — though as I recall most of the
“members’ of Ashley Madison weren’t husbands looking for women to cheat with
but wives looking to catch their husbands looking for alternative sex partners)
to meet women who would be
willing partners in what he wanted. Though the producing companies, MarVista
Entertainment and Cartel Pictures, are familiar Lifetime names, the director,
Chris James, and writers, Sophie Tilson and Shonrah Wakefield, were new to me,
and the unusual (for Lifetime scribes) artistry with which Tilson and Wakefield
depicted the inevitable scene in which the two cops have to question the
victim’s wife is shown in her attitude towards her husband’s murder, which is
neither grief nor good-riddance joy but a sort of bored hauteur in which both her vocal inflections and her attitude
say, “Why are you bothering me with this shit?” The next murder victim is a
Fundamentalist minister who was into being flagellated, ostensibly to purge the
demons from his soul but really to get off — after he was beaten his wife would
notice that he had an erection (and though the writers don’t say so, he
probably immediately demanded sex from her) — and so he joined Adeline Lilly to meet women who’d be willing
to flog him, until the site got hacked and he got exposed and ultimately
killed.
Then an agent of something called “Incognito” (i.e., “Anonymous”),
wearing as close to the V for Vendetta version of the Guy Fawkes mask as MarVista and Cartel could get away
with without Warner Bros. and DC Comics suing them, starts hacking into the
police video channel and, later, on local TV stations’ news shows boasting
about committing the crimes and basically saying they’re killing adulterers to
bring them to justice. The third victim is Rick, a long-haired, rail-thin and
quite sexy fellow police detective (and director James emphasizes his sex
appeal with a lot of mid-shots of his crotch with his police badge pinned next
to it) who was also Max’s off-duty husband for 15 years until she got tired of
his constant cheating and dumped him. Now Max is with a milquetoast guy named
Simon, but Rick warns her that Simon is “a bigger predator than I am” — obviously
a clue that Simon himself might be the mystery serial killer. According to U.S.
law (at least as depicted in this film), once cops in a local jurisdiction have
three recent murders that are similar enough they appear to have been committed
by the same killer, they’re declared serial killings and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) is called in and takes over the case, though they have the
option of inviting the local cops to join them as junior partners on a
so-called “task force.” Of course, Max has no intention of letting her case be taken over by an FBI-led “task force” which
will relegate her and her fellow local Brixton detectives to supporting roles —
especially after further “Incognito” videos appear and she realizes that the
culprit, whoever he (or she) may be under the mask, is either a fellow police
officer or someone she knows well and is tormenting her in particular.
The woman who set up “Adelina Lilly”
becomes victim number four — her body is found by runners along the “Shenandoah
Trail” (in California? I don’t
think so) — and Max’s friend Jennifer “Jen” Highfield (Alyshia Ochse), who’s
been in treatment for sex addiction and in one scene comes on to Max’s boring
boyfriend Simon — leading Simon to tell Max that Jen is no longer welcome in their
home, which complicates things when Jen’s husband Glenn sees her name and photo
on the list of Adelina Lilly’s clients and throws her out and Max wants to take
her in. Eventually [spoiler alert!]
Glenn turns out to be the real killer — he caught on to Jen’s infidelities
early on but decided instead of just killing her to take twisted revenge on all the spouses he could find who were engaged in
extra-relational activities. There are other characters as well, including a
Latino cop who runs the Brixton PD’s
IT department and investigates cyber-crimes — who’ll share his findings
with Max but not her partner Nick
because, for some reason left powerfully unstated, he just plain doesn’t like
Nick. (Thus writers Tilson and Wakefield economically set up both the Latino IT guy and Nick as red herrings.) There
are a few silly bits typical of Lifetime’s sloppiness — including one scene in
which Max is assaulted inside her own car by a mysterious figure in a black
hoodie (black hoodies and accompanying gloves have become de rigueur wear for Lifetime street assailants because they
conceal the attacker’s race and
gender), though this plot thread gets dropped quickly and we never find out who
Max’s attacker was or what his or her motives were.
But the parts of this movie
that lapse into Lifetime’s usual formulae are unimportant compared to the many
things it does get right, notably
the seriousness of tone. Director James stages the whole thing in a kind of
dark, matter-of-fact style reminiscent of the more serious British
police-procedural telecasts rather than the slam-bang sensationalism of
Lifetime’s usual fare, and cinematographer Seth Johnson creates striking images
and an overall dark, neo-noir
atmosphere a far cry from the unimaginative photography of most Lifetime
thrillers. Writers Tilson and Wakefield create an appropriately somber story
and avoid Lifetime’s usual sensationalism; they and James show us the murder
scenes but in a way designed to shock rather than titillate, and overall they
play against the potentials of
the story for both sex exploitation and gore. The acting is also quite subtly
done — I only wish my online sources gave me more names associated with their
parts than just the three listed on https://meaww.com
— with Melissa Archer turning in a performance as a tough-as-nails woman cop
that isn’t as sexual or in-your-face aggressive as Mariska Hargitay on Law
and Order: Special Victims Unit but in its
way is equally credible, and Brandon Beemer as Nick (who refers to himself as
her “work husband” and whom I was hoping would get together with her at the end
after Simon was revealed to be the killer, which was where I thought this was going) and the actors playing Simon and
Rick also especially powerful. Even macabre plot gimmicks like Max learning
that Jen’s been kidnapped when she’s sent a gift-wrapped package containing
Jen’s severed finger (still containing her wedding ring, which is how she
realizes it’s hers) are used effectively without breaking the overall somber
mood of the piece. Their Killer Affair may not have been the movie I was expecting, but in its own right it’s
a quite impressive thriller and a far cry from the slovenly sleaziness of all
too many Lifetime movies.
