Fatal Fiancé (Cartel Pictures, Lifetime, 2020)

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

Last night at 8 p.m. Lifetime showed another “premiere” movie, Fatal Fiancé, a Cartel Pictures production from Canada (though set in the U.S. and with a few stock shots of the Los Angeles sunsets – whenever I see one of these heavily orange dusks in a LIfetime movie I start singing, “Welcome to the Hotel California … ”). Directed by Ben Meyerson from a script by Genevieve Russell, Fatal Fiancé deals with 20-something blonde Leah Mitchell (Brittany Underwood, whom I’ve seen before in similar clueless-blonde roles on other Lifetime movies) and her upcoming wedding to financial-services guy Mark Pfeiffer (Greg Perrow, an unusual physical “type” for a Lifetime movie because he’s neither the tall, lanky, sandy-haired type Lifetime producers like for their innocent husbands nor the muscular hunks they cast as their male villains; he’s tall and decidedly beefy). We hear from some of the other characters, including Leah’s best friend Priya (Casey O’Keefe) – another blonde who doesn’t look at all (East) Indian, despite what you might think from her name – and her mother, that Leah has a history of commitment-phobia and bailing out of relationships with men before they get too serious, so they’re really glad to see her hook up with someone to the point of planning a wedding. They’re especially glad to see her with Mark, who looks like a great “catch” both physically and financially (what Leah herself does for a living, if anything, is unspecified, though she seems to be reasonably well-off), only there’s trouble in paradise because Leah is being stalked by a strange dark-haired woman who at one point actually hides in her car (Leah notices her and sprays her with chemical Mace – so much Mace gets used in this movie it might almost be an advertising video for it).

On the day of their scheduled wedding Leah disappears and never shows up – and while mom and Priya assume she’s just bailed out of another commitment again, we know that that mysterious woman has kidnapped her. It turns out the woman is Faith Keppler (Camille Banus) and she’s an ex of Mark’s – only when they dated she knew him as Brian Hoffner. Just how long she and Mark a.k.a. Brian were together is a matter of dispute – Mark tells Leah it was only six months but Faith says it was five years, during which he was charming at first but eventually took over more and more of her life until she was a virtual prisoner in their home. Mark also tells Leah that Faith is psychotic, but eventually Leah visits Dr. Batra (Jane Gardner), the psychiatrist who treated Faith, and despite the usual whining about “doctor-patient confidentiality” Dr. Batra lets slip that Faith’s actual diagnosis is post-traumatic stress disorder., and the traumatic stress that gave it to her was her five-year relationship with Mark. Meanwhile Mark takes the initiative in the relationship, cornering Faith in the old summer home of theirs to which she had taken Leah on the original wedding day and getting so angry he strangles and nearly kills her. As the story progresses Mark gets more and more unhinged and displays to both Leah and the audience the sort of controlling behavior Faith was trying to warn Leah about, including installing elaborate security cameras throughout their home (including one in their bedroom – which brings up the kinky possibility that he likes to film them having sex so he can watch it later) and putting a tracking app on her cell phone so he can know where she is at all times. Leah tells Mark she doesn’t want that app on her phone, but shortly after that she takes a shower and Mark grabs the phone and installs the app anyway.

Mark uses the app to discover that Leah has been to the clinic where Faith was treated, and ultimately he assaults Faith and doesn’t kill her but puts her in a coma, then shows up at the hospital intending to finish the job. Dr. Batra has ordered a person from hospital security to stand guard at the door to Faith’s room in case Mark makes another attempt on her life, but the guy (who’s also shown dating a nurse and lamenting that they can’t get away for some secret nookie on the premises) goes out for a snack from the vending machine and Mark sneaks into Faith’s room and removes her oxygen mask – though the security guy returns before Faith has croaked and Mark hurriedly puts it back on so no one will suspect him. Ultimately Leah decides to open Mark’s safe, where she correctly guesses the combination (the numeric code for “Brian”) and retrieves his former state ID and other papers confirming his true identity as Brian Hoffner – but it’s a trap: Mark has been monitoring her on one of his ubiquitous cameras and, when she and Priya try to call the police, Mark intercepts the call and lures the two women to one of his resort homes, where he seems to intend to scare Leah into resuming their relationship (he’s rescheduled the marriage for a month later without consulting her) and, if that doesn’t work, to kill both of them. But Leah manages to incapacitate him with chemical Mace (again!) until the police – the real ones – arrive and presumably arrest him, though it’s possible Genevieve Russell is keeping him alive for a possible sequel in which he continues to stalk Leah and make her life a living hell as she tries to start a new life and a new relationship with someone else.

I’m a bit surprised that the imdb.com page on Fatal Fiancé doesn’t list an alternative title for the movie, because writer Russell seemed to be setting up a surprise twist in which we would have spent the first half of the movie thinking Mark was a wonderful guy and Faith was a crazy stalker, and only midway would she reveal that Mark was the crazy one – but the title Lifetime and their long-time producers, Canada’s Cartel Pictures, slapped on this one gave away the whole story and undid Russell’s carefully crafted suspense structure. I’ve often complained about Lifetime movies that were well directed but had silly writing; this one is just the reverse – Russell actually did her job quite well (particularly in delineating the character of Mark and gradually letting slip the psychopathology under his personable and even charming surface) but Ben Meyerson way overdirected, doing stupid camera tricks and even worse sound design. The music (no composer is credited on imdb.com) is so overwrought it drowns out key bits of the dialogue and has so many blips, burbles and other noises that at times what I thought was an important sound effect turned out to be part of the score. With a more restrained director and a more ambiguous title, Fatal Fiancé could have been an unusually good Lifetime movie instead of just another ho-hum run-through of Lifetime’s usual formulae.