Burning Little Lies (Maple Island Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night Lifetime showed a “premiere” of a film called Burning LIttle Lies – it was originally shot as just Burning Lies but I suspect the folks at Lifetime (the production company was Maple Island Films and the distributors our old friends at Reel One Entertainment) added the word “little” to make the film sound more like Big Little Lies, the quirky suspense novel by Australian writer Liane Moriarty that became a miniseries (with the locale moved from Australia to Monterey, California) and a major hit. Burning Little Lies is set in Los Angeles, but apparently in a small outpost within the city that functions largely like a small town – or at least a movie small town – in which everyone knows everyone else and people who haven’t seen each other since high school suddenly re-meet and recognize each other instantly. It’s yet another Lifetime “premiere” that’s so new imdb.com doesn’t have complete information on it, though at least they list the director and writer – who here are the same person, John Murlowski, though another writer, J. Emilio Martinez, gets “original story” credit – and some of the actors, though not with the names of their characters.

The central character is Heather King (Annika Foster), who’s been working as a fashion designer in Paris when she suddenly flies home after her father and stepmother are killed in a fire in their mountain cabin. (This is one Lifetime movie that begins, not ends, in a deserted mountain cabin.) When she arrives she learns that her stepsister Gwen (Ashlynn Yennie) has already held the funeral and is planning to liquidate the estate immediately – including all the sentimental photos and other possessions Heather remembers from her childhood, among which is a bike with tassels hanging from the handlebars. Heather runs into a high-school acquaintance named Ben (Jamie Roy) who had a crush on her back then, when he was a rather nerdy and nondescript guy nobody in high school particularly liked. Today he’s a buff firefighter and Murlowski and his cinematographer gives us a lot of tantalizing glimpses of his body, including a long scene in which he rescues her after her bike’s brakes fail and she nearly plunges off a cliff. He also carefully builds up Ben as a red herring, making it look like he’s the typical hot-guy Lifetime psycho out to possess and dominate the heroine no matter how many people he has to kill along the way.

Only the big surprise twist at the ending is that Heather’s malevolent stalker, who later sabotages her car so it burns up and she barely escapes with her life, is neither Ben nor her asshole ex-husband Richard but [spoiler alert!] Gwen’s husband Jason (Mark Hupka), whose software company has gone south. He’s lost his biggest investor over delays in the launch of his newest upgrade and the resulting hemorrhaging of his user base, and he figures he can bail himself out of it by murdering his in-laws and his wife’s inconvenient half-sister so he can grab the King family fortune. I’ll say one thing for John Murlowski: he’s an excellent director of action sequences. The three big set-pieces – Heather’s close brushes with death both on her bike and in her car, and a later one in which an unseen driver runs Heather’s ex-husband Richard’s car off the road and over a cliff (noting the similarity of this with the scene in the 1933 The Invisible Man when the title character similarly kills his former associate Kemp by running his car off the road and over a cliff, I said, “Goodbye, Mr. Kemp”) – are all genuinely exciting and suspenseful. The rest of the movie isn’t up to that level but it’s still better-than-average Lifetime, and it’s nice for once that the drop-dead gorgeous hunk is not the psycho villain; indeed, the final scene shows Ben and Heather not only together but Heather visibly pregnant by him, and Gwen congratulating her for having landed the nice man while it was Gwen’s seemingly nice and successful husband who turned out to be the psycho.