Dying for a Daughter, a.k.a. A Mother’s Secret (Hybrid/Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime movie in the 8 p.m. time slot, usually reserved for their “premieres,” was actually one they first showed last November 7 but which I somehow missed: Dying for a Daughter a.k.a. A Mother’s Secret (imdb.com lists Dying for a Daughter as the working title and A Mother’s Secret as the current one, but Dying for a Daughter was the one on the credits even though it’s a misnomer – as we shall see, Killing for a Daughter would actually have been more accurate). It begins on a mountain road in the dead of night in which mother Samantha (Melanie Nelson), usually called “Sam,” and her 10-year-old daughter Cassie (Scarlett Roselynn) are having an argument because Cassie has unhooked her seat belt and got out of the back seat to look for a book. Just then Sam loses control of the car, it runs off the road and Sam is relatively unscathed but Cassie is badly injured and ends up needing a wheelchair. Cassie ends up in a hospital, where she needs a large blood transfusion, and it’s when the doctors discover that neither Sam nor her husband Tom (Brandon Ray Olive, a shorter and beefier “type” than the usual tall, lanky, sandy-haired guys who usually play innocent husbands on Lifetime movies but equally unsexy) is a matching blood type for their daughter.

From this both the hospital staff and we learn that Cassie was adopted, and the film’s main intrigue features a nurse named Margaret Smith (Brittany Underwood, a frequent star of Lifetime movies, though she’s usually cast in good-girl victim roles and here she’s the perky-psycho villainess) who manages to get the job of live-in nurse to take care of Cassie after she’s released from the hospital. She does this by impersonating Rachel, another nurse from her agency, and of course she’s up to no good. Fred Olen Ray, who produced, directed and wrote this film, makes Margaret a.k.a. Rachel a smart, sexy woman determined to eliminate Sam, seduce Tom into marrying her, and claim Cassie for her own. One thing I’m glad Ray didn’t do was make Cassie Tom’s biological child – we get a lot of dialogue about how Tom had an affair several years previously and I was bracing myself for the plot twist that Margaret was Tom’s affair partner, Cassie was the result of it and so Cassie is Tom’s (but not Sam’s) biological child. I had forgot about that clue back in the hospital that Cassie’s blood type isn’t a match for either Tom’s or Sam’s, which was definitively supposed to establish that she’s not biological kin to either of her adoptive parents.

But Ray does do a lot of Chekhovian “planting” in his script, establishing not only a gun (an old pistol of Tom’s which Margaret a.k.a. Rachel discovers in his effects) but also an allergy: the moment Sam tells Rachel that she’s deathly allergic to soy, we just know that at some point Rachel will attempt to poison her with soy milk, and she does, spiking her dairy milk with it and feeding it to her in tea. Rachel even pretends to get Sam her anti-allergy medication but doesn’t (so sometime in his life Fred Olen Ray had seen The Little Foxes) and she’s saved only by Tom, who comes home unexpectedly and gets his wife the pill that will keep her alive. Rachel also gives Cassie major amounts of drugs for reasons Ray never quite explains, and in one chilling scene she drugs Tom’s drink (she pours one for herself as well but pours Tom a bigger drink so she can tell the spiked and the unspiked one apart) so he loses consciousness, then straddles him and takes selfies that are supposed to make Sam think that Tom has lapsed back into his old cheatin’ ways and is having an affair with their nurse. And as if Ray hadn’t tapped into enough Lifetime clichés already, he writes a character called Karen (Karina Segura) who’s Sam’s work partner and best friend, and though she’s white instead of Black Karen enacts the part of the Heroine’s Best Friend Who Discovers the Villainess’s Plot but Gets Killed Before She Can Tell Anybody.

He even has Rachel – or Margaret – kidnap Cassie at the end, though mom realizes where she is when Cassie, who thinks she’s just on an innocent ice-cream date with her caregiver, texts a selfie of her and Rachel together and Sam recognizes the poster on the back wall as Boyd’s Café. Sam arrives too late but she gives chase, and at the end there’s a confrontation scene at Sam’s and Tom’s home in which Sam and Margaret (by this time, courtesy of a Black woman police detective who’s Lifetime’s obligatory African-American Authority Figure who solves all the white characters’ problems, Sam knows who Margaret really is) have a fight, Margaret threatens to shoot Sam with Tom’s old pistol, Sam attacks her and manages to get her to let go of the gun, and Cassie picks it up. I was hoping Cassie would shoot her mom’s assailant herself, but instead she gives the gun to Sam and she shoots Margaret in the abdomen. We’ve also learned that Margaret sold her unborn child to a baby broker and it is not the one Tom and Sam adopted – in fact Cassie’s birth mother was a French exchange student and they met her as part of the adoption process – and that Margaret spent time in a mental hospital before they declared her “cured” and loosed her upon the world again. Aside from a nice perky-psycho performance by Brittany Underwood, who turns out to be quite good as a cock-tease and doesn’t overplay her mad scenes, Dying for a Daughter a.k.a. A Mother’s Secret is just another Lifetime movie; my husband Charles commented laconically, “I’ve seen worse,” but we’ve also seen better Lifetime films than this rather perfunctory run-through of a bunch of their well-worn formulae.