The Evil Twin (Fireside Pictures, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night I watched last night’s Lifetime “Premiere” movie (though I’m not sure they’re still calling them that), The Evil Twin. Produced by Johnson Production Group, Fireside Pictures and Lifetime itself – though the director, Max McGuire, and writers, S. L. Heath and Shawn Riopelle, aren’t names I recognize from the usual Johnson Production Group “stable” – The Evil Twin is yet another Lifetime story about twin girls (I can’t remember them having done one about twin boys!) separated shortly after birth and adopted by different people, then meeting up later with each having had no idea of the other’s existence. Of course it’s always the case in stories like this that one of the girls grows up to be a good woman and the other grows up to be a bad one – though I give writers Heath and Riopelle points for having named them Charlotte and Emily, after Charlotte and Emily Brontë, 19th century British Gothic romance authors of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, respectively. I’m sure this was deliberate because one of the minor (but definitely important) characters is a nine-year-old girl who’s already a big fan of Jane Austen, the leading British woman romance writer in the generation before the Brontës.

The good girl is Emily North (Emily Piggford, who’s visibly Asian-looking despite her British last name), who’s just returned to the village of Mill Creek in upstate New York to take care of her terminally ill adoptive mother and run her antique store, Big Vintage – though we never see mom and I presume we’re supposed to think she’s already dead – and also to flee an abusive relationship with Jared Rensler (Jon McLaren), a boyfriend she left when he grabbed hold of her and tried to restrain her when she wanted to walk out on him. Only the moment she arrives in town she finds she’s being stalked by another guy, Blake Forsbeck (Tomas Chovanec), who blocks her car with his and gives her a nasty warning to get out of town … or else. It turns out that the bad sister, Charlotte Harris (also Emily Piggford), was having an affair of her own with Blake’s brother Trevor (who’s dead at the start of the action but is seen in a truly weird flashback in which he’s played by Gregory Wilson) until he mysteriously died in his home of carbon monoxide poisoning. Only both Blake and their parents are convinced Charlotte actually killed Trevor and are fiercely resisting Charlotte’s claims on Trevor’s estate. The town busybody, Vera Biehl, is also convinced Charlotte is a killer and therefore joins in the verbal assault on Emily, who in the tradition of innocent (in both the non-criminal and naïve meanings of the word) Lifetime heroines is at first overjoyed with the revelation that she has a previously unknown twin sister with whom she can presumably start a family bond.

The plot is pretty straightforward and is kicked into high gear when a man named David (Ish Morris, who according to his imdb.com page is part Jamaican and part Irish but looks Asian enough to be a suitable match for Our Heroine) comes into Emily’s store with his nine-year-old daughter, who’s the Jane Austen fan (she’s reading Pride and Prejudice and we get the impression it’s not for the first time either), and buys an authentic early 19th century desk because the daughter will think it’s cool to write on a desk like the one Austen herself used. David asks Emily if she can have the desk delivered, but it’s obvious he wants more out of her than just to drop off a piece of furniture; once she shows up he asks her to stay for dinner, she accepts and we see all the indicia of a burgeoning Lifetime romance. (What happened to David’s daughter’s mom is never specified, though given the way Lifetime usually concocts its scripts, the only reasons a male would be a single parent are either he’s a widower or he’s gone through an exceptionally bitter divorce from a woman so irresponsible she was denied custody.) Since Emily Piggford is playing both twins, it’s hard to tell them apart – especially once Charlotte decides to cut off her long hair and wear it in the same butch cut as Emily does (I suspect the long hair was a wig and the short version is what Emily Piggford really looks like) – and it’s not surprising that this becomes a key plot point. Through much of the movie it’s not all that clear just what Charlotte is up to, though it seems to involve either trying to frame Emily for a crime Charlotte committed or to kill Emily herself and take over her life à la Bette Davis’s two “twin” movies, A Stolen Life (1946) and Dead Ringer (1964). Charlotte even leaves Mill Creek briefly enough to visit Jared (ya remember Jared?) and come on to him, then attack and nearly kill him as he responds to her advances.

The climax, in a manner of speaking, comes when Emily breaks into the home where Charlotte is staying (the one Trevor supposedly gave her as a pied-à-terre for their assignations) and recovers a flash drive containing a surveillance video. It seems Trevor bugged his own bedroom and the camera actually recorded Charlotte murdering him – not, as we would have thought, by sabotaging his heating system so his home filled with carbon monoxide and he died in what would look like an “accident,” but by assaulting and strangling him while they were actually having sex, with her on top. That’s when this movie pretty much lost me, not only because even the most cursory examination of a body would be able to determine whether the deceased met his end through carbon monoxide or strangulation (I flagged that as a “goof” on imdb.com) but because of the whole queasy feeling one gets at the thought of someone murdering someone else while the two are having sex and supposedly both having a good time. What’s more, it’s the only soft-core porn scene we get in this movie! Later on Charlotte knocks out Emily (though for some reason Emily still has the fatal flash drive and it’s on her person when she escapes) and Charlotte makes an open sexual pass at David. David tells her – he still thinks she’s Emily – that they’re going too fast and he doesn’t want to have sex with her that soon, especially with his daughter still in the other room. Then David offers Charlotte hot chocolate with a sprig of mint – something Emily had previously told him was her all-time favorite drink – and when Charlotte says, “I’m not really a mint kind of person,” that’s the obligatory slip in an impersonation story.

Immediately David knows the woman is Charlotte posing as Emily, and when he calls her on it she responds by grabbing the nearest blunt instrument and whacking him over the head with it – for someone with a reputation as a murderess Charlotte isn’t particularly good at it: quite a lot of her would-be victims survive her assaults on them and are still alive at the end – and in yet another of the grand traditions of Lifetime villainesses she kidnaps David’s daughter. Only Emily figures out where Charlotte is likely to take the girl and she leads the police, led by a cute if not all that sexy African-American detective named Miller (Rodrigues A. Williams), to that spot. Ultimately the police arrest Charlotte while Emily is free to run her antiques store and become that nice, cute little girl’s stepmother. The Evil Twin has its good points; Max McGuire is a highly competent director who keeps the tension up and manages the scenes between both twins effectively, even though instead of using digital techniques he and his crew did the joint shots the old-fashioned way, using body doubles for whichever sister is shown with her back to the camera and avoiding digital effects work that would probably be beyond a Lifetime budget anyway). But the script doesn’t help; like a lot of Lifetime movies these days it’s pretty much a ragbag of their familiar clichés – and, in this case, clichés that were part of the general run of films like this before the makers of this one were even born. I will give Emily Piggford credit for managing to differentiate her performances as Charlotte and Emily and to do it subtly instead of turning one sister into a gooder-than-good doll and the other a raving lunatic, and also to the writers for avoiding having one sister kill the other and assume her place – but it’s not all that clear from scene to scene exactly what Charlotte’s villainy is supposed to accomplish and what she hopes to gain from it. It is an interesting coincidence that while Lifetime was airing this movie Turner Classic Movies was showing the 1954 film noir Witness to Murder (see below), which likewise features a villain (in the earlier film it’s a man) killing his victim by strangulation while the two of them are supposedly making love!