Death Saved My Life (Lifetime Productions, 2021)

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

After By Candlelight I turned on the Lifetime channel for the “premiere” of a TV-movie called Death Saved My Life. When I read the Lifetime synopsis of this one – which described its leading character, Jade Thompson (Meagan Good), as a woman who seems to have a picture-perfect happy marriage but is really being brutally controlled and physically abused by her husband, super-heart surgeon Dr. Ed Thompson (Chiké Okonkwo), who hires a hit man to kill her after he becomes convinced she’s having an affair with someone from her office, then decides the only way she can escape the situation is to fake her own death – I thought, “Ah, it’s Sleeping with the Enemy.” When the movie started and I saw the leading characters were Black, I thought, “It’s Sleeping with the Enemy – the race version.” Death Saved My Life was supposedly “inspired by a true story” – though at the end Lifetime did a “Behind the Headlines” segment with author Elizabeth Greenwood, who’s done a book about people who fake their own deaths and disappear, and it made it clear this movie is a fictional work based on a composite of real “pseudocides” (Greenwood’s awkward term for people who fake their own suicides) rather than an actual true story.

It was directed by Seth Jarrett from a script by Barbara Kymlicka, who was J. Bryan Dick’s writing partner for all those lubricious scripts about the women students at Whittendale University whoring themselves out to rich men as mistresses or call girls to pay Whittendale’s tuition. I made jokes about them needing to change their names because it seemed ridiculous to have these sexually charged scripts coming from Mr. Dick and Ms. Cum-Licker, but my admiration for Barbara Kymlicka’s talents as a writer has shot up several notches after this one. She puts enough fresh spins on the Sleeping with the Enemy plot template that Death Saved My Life counts at least in part as truly original even though some parts of the plot gave Charles credibility problems – notably the idea that seemingly out of nowhere, after nine years of marriage, Ed would suddenly start being abusive and controlling towards Jade and no one would notice. Jade’s ability to escape her marriage comes with more speed bumps than usual, from Ed’s insistence that “if I can’t have you, no one will” (though Ian, the co-worker in Jade’s office whom Ed suspects she’s having an affair with, is portrayed as so Gay one would expect him to react, “Your husband’s jealous of me? My boyfriend and I will have a good laugh about that!”)

One of the unusual, if not especially original, aspects Kymlicka brings to this story is the virtually Kafka-esque predicament Jade is put through when she tries to leave Ed: not only have the two of them carefully concealed his history of abusing her, but the townspeople in the small town of “Hannonville,” where this takes place, think their super-surgeon walks on water and the local police chief happens to be Dr. Ed’s best friend and was best man when he married Jade. Unable to go to the police – and determined to stay in town and nail him for her attempted murder (unlike the Julia Roberts character in Sleeping with the Enemy, who got as far the hell away from her abusive ex as she could and lived in terror that he’d find where she was and finish her off), she decides the only way she can get him to pay legally is to extract a confession from him. Accordingly she stays in town, sometimes hiding out with her sister Leigh (La’Myla Good, Meagan Good’s sister in real life), other times heaven knows where. She remotely keeps an eye on her and Ed’s daughter Jayla, and she also traces the hit man Ed paid to kill her, Donny Eastwood (Robert Ell) – and one wonders if Kymlicka gave him that character name as an ironic contrast between Clint Eastwood’s image and Donny Eastwood’s sheer ineptitude as a hit person. Donny is drawn as a doofus parolee who looks like he’s going back to prison any moment now, and there’s an interesting, almost Hitchcockian reversal in our moral attitude towards him when we realize he’s such a scumbag, ready to take credit and fee for killing a person who just left a lot of her own blood around her apartment to make it look like someone had killed her and taken her body, that we resent that he’s ripping off Dr. Thompson for taking money for a job he hasn’t done. (“It’s bad enough that he’s a hit man – he’s not even an honest hit man!”)

As Jade hides out in a succession of seedy motels – sometimes she’s willing to stay at her sister’s but at other times she’s aware that going there puts both women at risk from her vengeful ex – she stages various ploys to intimidate Dr. Ed. She makes a reservation for her 10th anniversary dinner at the restaurant that was her ex’s favorite, and he shows up for it and finds the dinner he would have wanted already ordered for him even though, of course, there’s no sign of her. She slips into the grungy apartment of her husband’s hit man and leaves a small white jewel case containing a ring she always wore during their marriage, and then Donny presents it to Ed as proof that he did indeed kill her, contrary to his suspicions. The low point comes when she hacks into the computer he uses at the hospital to do his PowerPoint demonstrations to show his assistants what’s going to happen in their next operation. Instead of the anatomical pictures he was expecting, the computer projects a visual simulation of Jade, first as she looked before all this happened and then slowly decomposing until her face becomes skeletal. (Given that she works as a graphic design artist, we assume she has the skills with computer photo and video programs to pull this off.) She also successfully drives Ed to drink after he had previously prided himself on not consuming alcohol to keep his hands steady for the highly skilled, delicate surgery he performed as his job – and of course Kymlicka gives him a speech about how he’s saved so many lives he’s entitled to take one now and again (her writing of Ed reminded me of the old joke, “What do you call a person who thinks he’s God? A schizophrenic. What do you call a person who knows he’s God? A doctor”) – only one morning when he has a major operation ahead of him he’s so smashed he literally can’t find the patient’s artery.

This was the point at which I began to question the morality of Jade’s actions: yes, the guy is an asshole and he beat her and tried to have her killed, but this part of her revenge is threatening the life of an innocent patient who did absolutely nothing to her and needs Ed’s skills to survive. (Fortunately, we’re told that Ed’s assistants came through and saved the poor guy’s life, but that doesn’t change the morality – or lack of same – of the scene.) Ed’s boss from the hospital comes out and orders him to take a leave of absence, telling him that if it were anybody else who’d shown up to do delicate surgery with alcohol on his breath he would have immediately fired him and reported him to the Medical Board to have his license pulled. The film ends with Jade’s sister Leigh organizing a memorial vigil for her (Jade dug a grave for herself, got partially in it and photographed herself to make it look like she was dead and her body had been found) and Ed showing up for it despite everyone else thinking he had her murdered. Eventually Jade herself shows up and the weight of the evidence finally convinces Sgt. Daley, head of the local police force and the best man at Ed’s and Jade’s wedding, that even though he and Ed are best buds Ed is still a criminal and he has to arrest him.

Death Set Me Free has some of the usual weaknesses of Lifetime movies, including one aspect that bothered Charles – how, outside of a major trauma or a substance problem, did nice, kindly Black Dr. Jekyll suddenly turn into Mr. Hyde nine years into a 10-year marriage? (Of course in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde it was a drug.) That bothered me less than it did Charles (I figured he could have been abusing her in the marriage all along and just have gradually got worse and more evil), but what bothered me about this movie in the credibility department was that Jade suddenly develops incredible skills as a surveillance detective and is able to sneak around various places and be unobserved. The incredible degree of risk she’s taking in doing things like breaking into Donny’s apartment (which is only accessible by a very intimidating set of wooden stairs wrapping around the building on the outside) and sneaking into Ed’s hospital to hack his computer also gave me a hard time in the believability department.

But even with those problems, Death Set Me Free seemed a few ticks up from your regular Lifetime fare, sensitively acted (particularly the leads; Chiké Okonkwo, who speaks with enough of an accent to sound African, or at least West Indian, instead of what we normally think of as African-American, catches the arrogance and self-righteousness right and at the same time gives Ed a surface admirability which we can readily believe has taken in most of the townspeople. And Meagan Good is equally good as Jade, making us believe why she would be too scared to leave this man – particularly since both sisters had post-traumatic stress disorder when their parents were killed in an accident and Dr. Ed has made a point to the townspeople about how generous he was to marry Jade even though her post-loss traumas had led to her being diagnosed as bipolar. Despite the typically tacky Lifetime title, Death Set Me Free has a haunting quality and the characters have dimension and complexity – and kudos to Kymlicka for not doing the Chekhov-pistol number with Jade’s daughter Jayla. Almost always in a Lifetime movie, if the heroine has a pre-pubescent daughter (or, more rarely, a son) at the beginning she (or he) will get kidnapped by the bad guy towards the end – and Kymlicka could easily have written that into this script, especially since the bad guy is also the daughter’s father and thus no one’s suspicions would have been aroused by seeing the two together.