Cradle Did Fall (Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

After re-running Lifetime’s last Saturday “premiere” this Sunday, they showed the Sunday “premiere”: Cradle Did Fall, yet another movie ostensibly based on a true story, though this time the writer, Adam Rockoff, changed the names of the characters and “tweaked” the story quite a bit in ways that were obviously intended to make it more dramatically interesting but, quite frankly, had the opposite effect. This time the central characters are Taylor Lewis (Ali Liebert), who just gave birth to baby girl Maya six months earlier and is beset with loneliness because her husband Dean is out of town on a long business trip (he’s some sort of United Nations official, and this time, for once in a Lifetime movie, we’re supposed to read “business trip” as just that and not a cover for “affair”); and Kathy Driver (Kirsten Robek), who runs into Taylor in the local park (the location is unspecified in the movie but the real story took place in Colorado Springs) and starts photographing her and Maya. Taylor is immediately suspicious that Kathy is stalking her and her baby, but Kathy assures her that she’s really an aspiring photographer. So far she’s specialized in landscapes but she’s looking to branch out into portraiture and make a career of it.

Kathy volunteers to shoot a set of baby pictures of Maya, and since she doesn’t have a professional studio she asks if they can do it in Taylor’s home. Of course it turns out her real motivation is she plans to kidnap Maya and give her to Kathy’s daughter Skyler, who has been unable to get pregnant even though she’s fixated on the whole concept of motherhood. Later we learn that this obsession has cost Skyler both her husband (one gets the impression he wanted to be a husband, not just a stud service) and her job. Kathy is determined to kidnap a child for Skyler not only because Skyler is so desperate for one, but kidnapping is how she got Skyler in the first place – she grabbed her two decades earlier and raised her as her own, with neither Skyler nor anyone else suspecting. Why Skyler’s biological parents never tried to find her is a mystery, but Kathy is worried that Taylor is not going to be so accommodating and will never rest until he finds her missing daughter – which means, to Kathy, that she will have to kill her.

Kathy and Skyler are helped immeasurably by the obligatory stupid cop, Detective Jim Gallagher – not listed on the imdb.com page but played by the usual avuncular African-American and portrayed as a near-total idiot who makes Inspector Lestrade look like Sherlock Holmes by comparison. Like most mystery-movie cops, he has a habit of fastening onto theories about the case that turn out to be totally wrong, and hanging on to them like a dog with a bone. First he’s convinced that Taylor killed her own kid as an outcome of post-partum depression. Then Taylor’s best friend, Lindsay Walsh, is ambushed at her home by Kathy Driver, who gained entrance by posing as another cop, “Cyndi Winters,” then sneaked up behind her and strangled her with her scarf. (So Lifetime showed two movies in a row that depicted deaths by strangulation – and with similar-looking weapons, at that.) Lindsay was white, not Black, but that didn’t spare her the fate of the Heroine’s Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot but Gets Killed for Her Pains in Lifetime’s sacred formulae. Kathy not only kills Lindsay, she strings her body up from a beam on her ceiling to make it look like she committed suicide, and left baby’s formula bottles and other detritus of infant parenting around to make it look like Lindsay had kidnapped Maya and then gone crazy over the strain and killed both Maya and herself.

In the end Taylor and Kathy have the usual Lifetime climatic fight to the finish and Taylor eventually kills Kathy in self-defense, and Skyler is arrested and put in a mental institution – but there’s one of the ominous tag scenes Lifetime has become addicted to recently, in which we get a credit reading “Two Years Later,” and two years later Taylor and her husband Dean (who’s actually quite sexy, especially for an actor playing an innocent husband on Lifetime!) are out in the park playing with Maya when we see them stalked by another photographer – presumably Skyler Driver, released from the mental hospital way too early. Lifetime has done other, much better melodramas about the lengths frustrated would-be mothers will go to kidnap babies so they can enjoy the thrill of parenthood – including Cries in the Dark (2006), in which a woman police detective investigates the murder of her eight-months-pregnant sister, in which her belly was literally sliced open so the killer, yet another frustrated would-be mother, could retrieve the baby when it was viable and essentially perform a D.I.Y. C-section (it was previously established that she had trained as a nurse, so she knew something about medical practice) so she could have “her” own kid at last. I remembered that one not only because it was unusually powerful and kept the gore to a necessary minimum, but because I formed an instant crush on Adrian Holmes, the actor who played the woman detective’s police partner, and I even posted a review to imdb.com urging Dick Wolf and the staff of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit to hire Holmes as Christopher Meloni’s replacement if and when Meloni quit the show. (Alas, they didn’t.)

Cradle Did Fall could have been a more powerful movie if it had stuck closer to the facts of the case – the fictional Kathy Driver and her daughter avoid any presence on social media (one reason Taylor gets so suspicious of them), while Kathy’s real-life prototype, Juliette Parker, not only had a Facebook page (which gave the cops some of the information they needed to catch her), she was such a public figure she even ran for Mayor of Colorado Springs in 2019. But there’s one good aspect about it: director Keenan Connor Tracy, who takes Rockoff’s rather silly and predictable script and has a feast day with it, dressing it up as almost Gothic horror and showing lots of scenes in which Kathy seems to have a nearly supernatural power to stalk Taylor and to frame her for Kathy’s own crime.