My Husband’s Killer Girlfriend (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2021)

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

The “premiere” Lifetime showed immediately afterwards, despite an even more risible title – My Husband’s Killer Girlfriend, which pretty much gives the whole plot away – actually turned out to be considerably better than My Father’s Other Family. Directed by Troy Scott (a name I didn’t recognize) from a script by Paul A. Birkett (whom I did), My Husband’s Killer Girlfriend turned out to be a quite good thriller with elements of Kafka and Hitchcock in the predicament it puts its heroine, Leah Watts (Cindy Busby), through. Leah has just gone through a traumatic divorce from attorney Adam Richley (Lane Edwards), and about the only thing the two didn’t contest when they were breaking up was Leah getting custody of their three-year-old daughter Emma. Only Leah, an insurance investigator with a highly prestigious and time-consuming job, has to take a business trip to Washington, D.C. and, in order to be able to leave Emma behind without having to turn her over to Adam, she hires a nanny named Valerie Dobbs (Chelsea Reist). The nanny comes with fabulous references and looks mousy, with brown hair and big glasses, but Leah compliments her on at least not being ancient and hires her.

She then takes off on her business trip but gets concerned when her attempts to video-phone her daughter on her tablet keep going unanswered and her calls to the nanny go straight to voicemail. Much to the disgust of her boss, she cuts her business trip short and flies from Washington to Seattle (where the story takes place, something we learn from an establishing long-shot of the Space Needle to establish “Seattleicity”) – where she’s promptly threatened with arrest for abandoning her daughter and locking her in her bedroom for three days. The case is taken by a racially ambiguous woman cop named Detective Santos (Lucia Walters), but Leah isn’t going to hold still for law enforcement when her liberty and her reputation as a decent mother are at stake. She soon learns that “Valerie Dobbs” is really Cathy Reynolds, and she’s actually blonde and a hot bimbo type her ex-husband is currently dating. Indeed, there’s an ironic touch in Birkett’s script in that we’ve seen Adam with Leah being very domineering – we get the impression that they broke up because she got tired of him trying to run her life – while with Cathy he’s almost literally being led around by his dick. There’s one impressive and blessedly non-underlined sequence in which she grabs his tie and leads him around his own house, clearly establishing that whatever he was going through with Leah, it’s Cathy who “wears the pants” in this relationship!

Leah confronts Adam and Cathy when they’re in a restaurant together and ends up punching out a Black cop who tries to arrest her for assaulting Cathy, so now she’s a fugitive wanted not only for abandoning her kid but assaulting a cop. And as if that isn’t enough trouble for her, she takes Detective Santos hostage and manages to grab the cop’s gun and hold it on her. Leah gets in touch with a Black computer expert, Kevin Duran (Hamza Fouad), whom she was about to report to her employer for insurance fraud involving his grandparents, and says that she’ll leave him alone if he does a computer search for “Cathy” – who, it turns out, is really a woman named Lisa Moore who lived in Alabama and beat her own baby girl to death. She was arrested and tried but was found to be psychopathic and put in a mental institution instead of prison – only she escaped. Leah learns all this from Lisa’s former psychiatrist, Dr. Tucker, whom she conference-calls and who is surprisingly willing to talk to her about his patient despite the usual medical omertà of “confidentiality” (maybe he figures that as an escaped mental patient with a fixation on babies Lisa is enough of a clear and present danger to Leah and Emma she falls within the “duty to warn”), and she manages to document enough of this to convince Adam, at least, that she’s not crazy and her husband’s new girlfriend is a clear and present danger to their daughter.

Meanwhile Lisa sneaks into the hospital where Emma is and kidnaps her, but fortunately she doesn’t get far because Leah, Adam and Detective Santos had all staked out the place – though there’s a final battle in which Lisa is holding a gun and she and Leah both reach for it (Maurine Dallas Watkins, your plagiarism attorney thanks you for his third vacation home in Cabo) and do a death embrace which ends with the two women being pulled apart – director Scott momentarily keeps us in suspense as to which woman got shot when the gun went off but, not surprisingly, it’s the villainess that got taken out while the heroine survives. There’s a tag scene I could have done without that hints that after the debacle of his mid-life crisis affair with the killer bimbo Adam is ready to reconcile with Leah – I wasn’t rooting for a reconciliation if only because he’d been such an asshole in their earlier scenes together – but for the most part My Husband’s Killer Girlfriend is a well-done suspense thriller. Writer Burkitt knew just how far to take Leah’s traumas without larding them on so much they became unbelievable, director Scott’s work is suspenseful and he had the benefit of two excellent actresses in the leads. Cindy Busby is surprisingly sexy and also a quite convincing action heroine, making her single-minded determination to rescue her daughter believable despite all the moral and legal lines she crosses to do so, and all the ways her current predicament stretches her and leads her to do things she never thought she could do before.

Chelsey Reist is just as good as the woman with the glare-ice mind that takes offense at the slightest provocation and responds in ways neither we nor the other characters expect. Her big moment comes when she – who’s already outfitted a room in her own home as a nursery and even posted Emma’s name on the wall, indicating what she’s really after from her relationship with Adam – proposes to him. Instead of immediately accepting her offer he hesitantly says, “Let’s wait a while and slow down.” She goes off into a hissy fit that ends with her not only rejecting his ham-handed advance (earlier it’s become clear to us, if not to him, that the only reason she’s having sex with him is to manipulate him) but ultimately leaving him flat and obviously deciding she’s going to take Emma with or without her dad. Instead of the usual ways psychos get played – the old-fashioned eye-rolling stuff, the nice person-next-door Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Perkins used in Psycho, or the overwrought perkiness of most teen (or 20-something) girl psychos in previous Lifetime movies – Reist’s performance is chilling in its off-handed intensity, more like a real crazy person than a movie character: the sort of person you could have a rational conversation with until something unbeknownst to you sets them off and they go off the normal track. Despite the dumb title, My Husband’s Killer Girlfriend is quite a good movie, and one would hope the director, the writer and the two women in the leads can all get careers beyond the confines of Lifetime!