A Mother’s Lie (Neshama Entertainment, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was a sometimes chilling, sometimes silly but generally entertaining effort called A Mother’s Lie. The story deals with a thirty-something married couple, Chuck and Katherine Robertson (Gabriel Vennen and Alex Paxton-Beesley); their daughter Haley (Zoe Tarantakis), who is dying from leukemia and needs an immediate bone-marrow transplant; and Katherine’s mother, Nora Hollingsworth (Louise Kerr), who seems to combine the worst features of Cruella de Vil and Endora from Bewitched. Nora, who makes it clear throughout the story that she can’t stand her son-in-law and thinks Katherine could have done way better in a choice of mate, is the owner of Hollingsworth Cosmetics. Her money has given her a position of power and influence which she uses relentlessly to further her goals, including the Big Lie at the center of the story. It seems that well before they got married and had Haley, Katherine and Chuck had sex and she got pregnant. Nora, hyper-concerned that her daughter’s unwed-mother status would affect her business and ruin her social standing, spirited Katherine away to a house in the hills, built a fully equipped maternity room and kept her there for the nine months until she was ready to give birth, then told Katherine that her baby was stillborn. In fact the baby survived and Nora put her up for adoption, and now she’s a college student named Libby (Madelyn Keys) who works as a barista at a local coffeehouse and has a male friend named Will (Nick Narre) who’d like to be more than a friend, but Libby keeps putting him off.

The only person besides Nora who knows that Katherine’s older daughter is still alive is the doctor who delivered her, Dr. Baker (Geraldine Ronan), but Nora has silenced her by giving her a major grant for clinical research but making it clear that if she ever breathes a word to Katherine (or anybody else) about the daughter’s true status, her funding would immediately be canceled. The implication is that Nora has also secretly been funding Libby’s scholarship and has suddenly pulled the funding, telling her that the funders have tightened the grant criteria, and leading Libby to decide to get tested for what she thinks is a public appeal to find a suitable bone-marrow donor match for the operation that could save Haley’s life. Libby takes the test, hoping that the money being paid for the bone-marrow donation will enable her to complete her current year at college, but Nora takes control of her life after that and insists that she and Will stay at the lake house, where she virtually imprisons them and tells them that they’re not to go into one room of the house that’s always kept locked up and contains “hidden family secrets” (which was actually the working title under which this film was shot). When Dr. Baker shows up at the hospital intent on telling Katherine that the bone-marrow donor who is saving her daughter’s life is in fact her previous daughter, Nora responds by sneaking up behind her and clubbing her with a blunt object – and the moment Nora kills the good doctor is the moment at which this film goes from being just another Lifetime melodrama to being a camp-fest. Nora also kills Amber (Grace Callahan), a nurse at the hospital who has figured out that Libby and Haley are sisters just by noticing how much they look alike, by shoving her down a flight of stairs in the hospital building.

When Will gets fatally curious about that mystery room in the house where they’re staying, picks the lock and discovers Nora’s dark secret, she clubs him, too, though fortunately he survives, and luckily at the end Katherine realizes not only that Libby is her daughter but where Nora is holding her, and summons the police to liberate Libby and save not only her life but Will’s as well, since (true to form for a Lifetime writer) he was merely wounded, not killed, by Nora’s homicidal attack. The finale takes place two months later and shows Katherine, Chuck, Haley and Libby as one big happy family (we never get to meet Libby’s adoptive parents; it would have been nice but probably the production companies, Neshama Entertainment and our old friends MarVista Entertainment, figured not showing them would mean two fewer actors to pay) with Haley fully recovered and playing like a normal girl her age. Effectively if rather straightforwardly directed by Stefan Brogren, A Mother’s Lie is lifted above the usual Lifetime level of mediocrity by Louise Kerr’s full-blooded performance as the villainous Nora; she etches the screen with acid and effectively delineates the character of a woman who is used to using her riches to manipulate and dominate people. Like Donald Trump, she’s convinced that she can make anything “true” she wants to be just by her sheer power and resources to manipulate others, and she’s not above killing to keep her various secrets and maintain the illusions she wants to create and everyone else to believe in. Kerr captures both the character’s amiability (though she also nails her inability to disguise what a weakling she thinks Chuck is and what a rotten choice he was for her daughter to marry). Nora is one of those characters that, in the words of a silent-era Universal publicist about Erich von Stroheim, you love to hate. She’s at once able to delineate the madwoman and make the character just campy enough you know you’re not supposed to take her that seriously. It’s a neatly balanced performance and makes A Mother’s Lie a good deal more entertaining than it would have been with a more straightforward, less flamboyant actress in the part.