Sorority Sister Killer (Robbins Entertainment, K5ive Media, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night at 8 p.m. Lifetime showed a “premiere” movie that turned out to be unexpectedly good despite a typically stupid, exploitative Lifetime title: Sorority Sister Killer. Directed by Tom Shell from a script by Chris Sivertson (the director’s name is unfamiliar but I’ve heard of the writer before), Sorority Sister Killer turned out to be a sensitive, moving drama about conflicting loyalties, adolescent peer pressures and the effects they have on young women (and men) just coming into their own maturity, physical, psychological and sexual. The central character is Lacey Montgomery (a remarlabky authoritative performance by Sarah Fisher), whose mother Britney (René Ashton) went through so bitter a divorce from Lacey’s dad she’s reverted to her maiden name, Wiles, and insists on being called “Miss” rather than “Mrs.” (or “Ms.”).Lacey is just about to start her first year of college at Rose State University and is looking forward to rooming with her lifelong best friend, Tara (Paige Kriet). Both girls pledge the Kappa sorority because their mothers both were part of it when they went to Rose State, and in the presence of the mothers the sorority’s student president, Courtney (Lani Randol), assures everyone that there’s no hazing at Kappa – but the moment the doors of the sorority house close she ridicules anyone who believed that and puts the would-be Kappa girls through a series of the usual humiliating ritual, including forcing them to drink distilled spirits straight from the bottle.

Courtney picks on one girl in particular, Tiffany (Brylee Russell), because she’s a “woman of size.” She forces Tiffany to strip totally naked, and Lacey is so appalled by the spectacle that she walks out of the Kappa initiation and tries to get Tara to come with her. Tara refuses, and the two lifelong friends have a breaking point that leads to Lacey joining the less prestigious rival Delta sorority (where the student president is African-American and the goings-on are rather sedate – there’s even a scene where Lacey and the Black girl who recruited her to Delta are shown at a big table helping each other with math homework, the one sign of actual education in this movie supposedly about higher education) even despite the warnings from the Kappas that joining the Deltas will kill Lacey’s social standing at the school. Despite the warnings that she’s not supposed even to be at the Kappa house, Lacey shows up there for a party that also includes her ex-boyfriend Lex (Tyler Lain) – she broke up with him because he’s a nice guy when sober but becomes mean when drunk, which is all too often (one wonders if he’ll shave his head and become a Superman villain – joke), and she confronts Tara about being willing to play along with the Kappas despite the humiliation they visited on the pledges in general and Tiffany in particular – even though Tiffany herself seems O.K. with it, grateful that the Kappas went ahead and admitted her after putting her through that humiliating piece of hell.

At the party Lacey and Tara have a big argument and then Tara falls off the roof and dies. Lacey’s grief over the loss of her friend – no matter how estranged they’d become lately – is compounded when the police investigating the case, officious Black detective Fuller (Sabreena Iman) and her good-cop white male partner Cross (Brooks Ryan), deduce from the angle at which her body landed and the fact that one of her shoes came off in the fall while the other was left behind on the rooftop that she didn’t just fall: she was pushed. They immediately conclude that Lacey was the killer – after all, Lacey was the last person seen with Tara alive and they had been arguing, and earlier Lacey had confronted and pushed one of the Kappas during their ill-fated initiation. Lacey thus gets put in the position of an Alfred Hitchcock hero, realizing that the only way she’s going to get herself exonerated for a murder she did not commit is to find the person who did. She interrogates Tiffany – who’s scared to death to see her because the Kappas are not supposed to talk to the Deltas, especially not Lacey, on pain of expulsion and social disgrace (the intensity of the sorority bond as depicted in this movie reminded me of the Divergent cycle and its motto, “Faction before blood”).

But Tiffany tells Lacey that as part of the Kappa initiation ritual Courtney had demanded that the pledges hand over their cell phones and give her their passcodes so she could open everybody’s phone and learn their most embarrassing secrets. In Tara’s case that meant that she and Lex had had sex – after Lacey broke up with him, though she was still worried that Lacey would be angry about it if she’d known Tara had in essence picked up her sloppy seconds – and the night of the party, just before Tara died, Courtney had invited Lex to the Kappa party by stealing Tara’s phone and sending Lex a message that Tara wanted to have sex with him again. He shows up and Courtney ushers them into a bedroom, where they go through the act more or less (it’s as close as we get to a soft-core porn scene in this movie, and it’s nice to see Tyler Lain without his shirt, but we’re clearly not supposed to like what’s going on). Then Lacey and Lex receive texts from the dead Tara – or at least from her phone, which was never recovered – and they find the phone is located in the Kappa house. Lacey gets word to the police and tells them to come on the assumption that whoever has Tara’s phone must be her killer – and they end up confronting Ella (Carolyn Grundman), who’s hanging out on the same edge of the Kappa house’s roof where Tara fell. It’s not clear what she intends to do, but in case she’s contemplating suicide the other Kappas gather around to talk her out of it.

Ella confesses that she killed Tara (one wonders why none of the girls think to record her confession on their phones – especially Lacey, since she’s the one who needs exoneration), and her motivation was that Tara was herself disgusted by the Kappas’ hazing rituals, only instead of doing a dramatic walkout she decided to remain in the house and collect evidence so she could report them to the school authorities, which would risk getting the Kappa house closed down. The ending is surprisingly humanistic for a Lifetime movie: Lacey’s and Tara’s mothers resume their former friendship, Lacey is not only exonerated but receives a video of Tara, which she recorded on her phone but was killed before she could send it, confessing her one-nighter with Lex and saying she still wanted to be friends, and even Courtney has a change of heart and realizes that the hazing she ordered made her at least partially responsible for Tara’s death. What makes Sorority Sister Killer an unusually good Lifetime movie is the weight of the emotion behind it and the sophistication of the script – Chris Sivertson created real people with genuinely conflicting emotional and social agendas, not mere stick figures to enact the clichés of Lifetime’s usual melodramas; Tom Shell responded with direction that propels us into the story (it’s clear he’s studied Hitchcock’s work, especially in the sheer number of scenes set on staircases, a Hitchcock trademark. And the actors respond with powerful, insightful performances – they knew how good the script was and they played to its strengths instead of just striking the usual Lifetime attitudes. Sorority Sister Killer is one of those rare Lifetime movies that transcends its clichés and makes us feel for the characters and ask ourselves what we would do in their places.