by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 8 p.m. Lifetime aired the third episode in the
Obsession “Thrillogy” (the truly weird
pun with which they tagged their three-part mini-series that aired last Friday,
Saturday and Sunday), Obsession: Her Final Vengeance. In the first two parts Madison Turner (Celeste
Desjardins) let Blake Connors (Travis Nelson) move in with her as a roommate,
only he seduced her and became her boyfriend even though he was also a career
criminal who left a trail of dead bodies, including that of her previous partner.
At the end of episode one he got arrested, but in episode two he escaped and
kidnapped her, holding her hostage for most of the movie and extracting a
million-dollar ransom from Madison’s sister Evie (Kelly Hope Taylor), leaving
us in suspense as to whether he was going to kill her or take her hostage and
flee the country with her as his lover for good. Madison actually killed Blake
at the end of episode two (though he appears in two scenes — one a flashback
and one a nightmare — so Travis Nelson still gets a credit for playing him),
and she and Evie moved from Philadelphia to Chicago, where Madison got a job at
a fashion house and within six months got promoted to marketing director. The
principal villainess in Her Final Vengeance is Lisa Bransworth (Anastasia Phillips), Blake’s
sister (his real name was Nicholas Bransworth), who in the first episode was a
mental patient in an institution until she was discharged because Nick had been
financing her care with his ill-gotten gains and once he croaked there was no
one left to pay her bills. (This isn’t the first time a Lifetime writer has
made this rather twisted argument that Medicare for All would reduce America’s
crime rate because then people wouldn’t have to commit crimes to pay their
family members’ medical bills.)
Melissa Cassera, who wrote the first two parts
of the Obsession trilogy,
scripted this one as well but Curtis Crawford replaced Alexander Carrière as
director — to the film’s benefit, because Crawford is a lot better at sinister atmospherics and creating a
neo-Gothic “look” out of otherwise prosaic modern surroundings. At the start of
Her Final Vengeance, Lisa is
living with Rodney Porter (Steve James), a schlub she got to marry her by faking a pregnancy, only
when he discovers the truth about her and takes down the photos she’s hung of
her and her brother (whose relationship seems positively incestuous), she stabs
him to death, steals his car and drives it to Chicago after learning from
social media where Madison Turner now lives. She assumes a fake identity,
“Courtney Robinson,” and gets a job interning at a mental hospital, where she
befriends a violent patient named Bethany H. (Lexi Ainsworth) who ended up in
the institution for attempting to stab her sister Charlotte (Kayla Jo Farris).
“Courtney” tells Bethany she no longer has to take her medications and bribes
her with her favorite food, chocolate-covered cherries, while at the same time
she befriends Madison and wins her trust by joining a support group for people
who’ve had traumatic experiences. She switches the pills in Madison’s
prescription bottle so instead of taking the anti-anxiety drug Madison was
prescribed, she gets on an anti-bipolar drug that causes her to get groggy and
blow an important presentation at work. Lisa’s plot is to drive Madison crazy,
make it look like she attempted suicide, get her committed on a 72-hour hold
and then sic Bethany on her with a knife to kill her while Madison is held on
the bed by restraints (an ironic echo of what Lisa’s brother did to her in episode
two!) — only when Madison is incarcerated the hospital notifies Evie, her next
of kin, and Evie flies out from Philadelphia to Chicago, and together she and
Madison’s new boyfriend, Wesley Summers (Ryan Bruce, cute but not so cute that we can’t believe in him as a Lifetime good
guy), set out to rescue Madison from her predicament.
Madison gets Bethany’s
knife away from her long enough to cut through the leather straps binding her
to the bed, but Bethany gets it back from her and the two struggle over it —
while, in a neat bit of parallel writing that impressed even my husband
Charles, Wesley is outside the hospital building wrestling with Lisa, who’s
trying to kill him with her brother’s old knife. Eventually both the good
people get the knives away from both the bad people, and Wesley stabs Lisa to
death — another artful parallel
in Cassera’s script: however Wesley’s and Madison’s relationship progresses
after this, they both have stabbed people in self-defense, and their victims
were brother and sister. Obsession: Her Final Vengeance in some ways the darkest and richest of the three,
yet it’s also the one that’s the most frustrating in terms of how many
potential points Cassera opened up and how few she actually nailed. Lisa
Bransworth is a rich and vivid creation — a far more interesting character than
her brother — able with her experience as a patient in psychiatric hospitals to
impersonate a nurse at one and also able to feign sanity well enough to crash a
support group for victims and ingratiate herself with the target of her
revenge. Anastasia Phillips delivers a remarkable performance, aided by a
bizarre resemblance to the late Janis Joplin — the same lines of dissipation on
an otherwise young and pretty face, and the same gaping mouth — capturing all
the facets writer Cassera gave this interesting character and at the same time
frustrating in that Cassera could have given her a lot more to work with.
Lisa
is something more than your traditional Lifetime villainess — at times we
almost feel sorry for her — and Cassera hints that she and Nick had an
incestuous relationship without making it too obvious. It’s just that there
seemed to me to be even more potential in these characters that Cassera
realized. The film is also weighted down by how ridiculously naïve Cassera made
Madison: it’s the sort of movie in which the heroine is so trusting, even after
all the traumatic events that happened to her in the first two episodes, you
wish you could walk into the screen, grab her and shake some sense into her.
And it doesn’t help that director Crawford, for all his command of atmosphere,
can’t get a decent performance out of Celeste Desjardins; as she did under
Alexander Carrière’s direction in the first two films, she just walks through
the action, looking pert and pretty but not giving us much in the way of acting
— albeit in an underwritten role that really doesn’t give her that much to work
with. Her Final Vengeance seems
the deepest and richest of the three films in the series, yet the story
situation and the characters (especially the bad ones) seem to have the
potential for even more depth and richness than actually got realized, and
though the ending appears to be a happy one Madison is still so guileless and
trusting (like Robert Browning’s Pippa) one can’t help but imagine Melissa
Cassera being able to write more scripts that put her through different kinds
of hell: if it had been made in the silent-film era one could readily imagine
this series being called The Miseries of Madison!
