How I Met Your Murderer (Imoto Productions, Daro Film Distribution, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night I watched two Lifetime movies in succession, and the first was actually pretty good: How I Met Your Murderer, directed by Emily Dell from a script by Kat Hess and Megan Yoon. (There are quite a few Asian names in the film’s crew, representing its origins with a company called Imoto Productions, distributed by Daro Film Corporation.) The central character is Mackenzie “Mac” Meyer (Rachele Schank), who along with her producer June Kim (Nicole Jia) has created a true-crime podcast called How I Met Your Murderer, which takes on famous cases, usually of serial killers. Mac mentions early on that her inspiration was true-crime writer Ann Rule, who got into the business when she realized that the nice young man she had dated earlier was later exposed as the notorious serial killer Ted Bundy – she wrote a memoir called The Stranger Beside Me about her relationship with Bundy, and spent the rest of her life dredging up notorious murder cases and making them even more notorious by writing about them.

Of course the writers are invoking this history to set up their heroine for a real-life relationship with a serial killer, and they duly deliver as Mac and her husband, an incredibly busy attorney named Henry (Billy Armstrong, considerably hotter than the milquetoast guys who usually play husbands on Lifetime movies – obviously casting director Lindsay Chag picked him because, with the usual Lifetime iconography that the hottest guy in the cast is the villain, she wanted us to be suspicious of him from the get-go). When the film begins Henry’s mother has just died and the couple have decided to relocate to Henry’s old home town, West Clarksville (did they take the last train there?), and live in his family’s old house. Only a woman mysteriously died there 15 years earlier on prom night at West Clarksville High School, and we see this happen in a prologue that shows her taking drugs and washing them down with alcohol, making it look like she was contemplating suicide and about to go through with it when a mysterious male figure came upon her and confronted her, with the result that she ended up face-down in the pool. The authorities back then ruled it suicide but many of the townspeople suspected Henry Meyer of murdering her because they had dated until prom night and they thought he had terminated an inconvenient relationship with extreme prejudice.

Following that might, three other West Clarksville women were found murdered – all of them young, all dark-haired and all winners of blue ribbons for something or other, which meant that authorities dubbed the murderer “The Blue-Ribbon Killer” and he was never caught. As a true-crime podcaster Mac finds the story of the “Blue Ribbon Killer” irresistible and decides to research it for her next episode, even though she gets mysterious texts, signed “dejavu49,” on her phone warning her off the case and someone throws a football through the window of her home with a message tied to it referencing the murders and the townspeople’s suspicions that Henry killed his high-school girlfriend. Then a young man named Oliver Turner (Chris Zylka) turns up; he’s the Meyers’ neighbor from across the street and he tells them he’s a police officer and also an amateur photographer.

He offers to help Mac with her podcast both as technical advisor and promotional photographer, but though he’s decent-looking he’s wearing dorky glasses that make him look like Drew Carey’s slenderer brother and he’s so twitchy we – or at least I – are certain from the get-go that he’s going to turn out to be the killer. He does, of course – he had an unrequited crush on the original victim and accidentally killed her when he confronted her on prom night after Henry dumped her, then reproduced the scene and killed three other women who looked like her (and as they’re moving our suspicions from Henry to Oliver they have Chris Zylka lose the glasses and shoot him to look much hunkier, once again fulfilling the Lifetime iconography that the hottest guy in the cast is the villain) – but in the meantime Hess and Yoon build up Henry Meyer into a formidable red herring, suggesting that his late “work” nights are really not only because he’s working hard on a case that will make him a partner in his law firm but he’s having an affair with his assistant, a woman named Evelyn whom we never see.

There’s also a chilling scene in which Mac looks at a photo of the murder victim who was Henry’s high-school girlfriend and notices how much she and Mac looked alike – which does at least briefly suggest Henry married Mac in the first place because of some sick attraction to that body type and hair color. Also Henry gives Mac a pair of earrings identical to the ones the victim was wearing when she was killed – though it turns out Henry didn’t give them to Mac after all; Oliver sneaked them into their home and she put them on without knowing what they were. Mac gets worked up into such a lather about her husband’s straying (which he’s doing) and his being a serial killer (which he isn’t) that she actually has sex with Oliver – the writers and director Dell blessedly give us really hot soft-core porn scenes between Mac and both of the men in her life (many of Lifetime’s movies derive much of their entertainment value from the soft-core porn, and it’s distressed me that they’ve cut back on it in recent years) – and of course he becomes obsessed with her and at the climax locks her in the same big room with the school’s swimming pool where he killed his first victim – only Henry figures it all out and summons the town’s police in time, and Mac manages to grab Oliver’s gun and shoot him in a nicely staged death embrace. How I Met Your Murderer isn’t exactly ground-breaking storytelling, but it’s a well-done thriller and one case in which Lifetime’s efforts to promote women directors paid off.