Labor of Lies (Reel One Entertainment, Maple Island Films, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie, Labor of Lies, was one so obscure imdb.com didn’t have a page on it and the only listings I could find for its cast and crew online listed just its three lead actors and no one else. Fortunately I was able to watch the first few minutes over again on a repeat showing at midnight and take down the information that the film was produced by the Pierre David-Tom Berry axis at Maple Island Films and Reel One Entertainment. It was both directed and photographed by John Murlowski from an original story by J. Emilio Martinez – who also got story credit for Murlowski’s immediately previous film on Lifetime, Burning Little Lies (he seems to like titles that end with the word “lies” since there are a lot of them in his filmography), though instead of working Martinez’s story into a script himself this time Murlowski hired another Lifetime “regular,” Adam Rockoff, to do it. Labor of Lies first introduces us to Jamie Williams (Jenna Mishno), who meets with a seedy-looking thug type who’s representing an ultra-rich man who literally wants to buy Jamie’s upcoming baby. He offers her a large sum (I think it was $25,000 but I’m not sure) up front and another equal amount when she delivers her baby and turns it over to him for a super-rich client who wants a bootleg baby and is willing to pay for one.

In the opening scene Jamie is wandering around the maternity ward of a hospital taking pictures of the security cameras – there’s a fantasy sequence in which she steals one of the babies and is caught, but what she’s actually doing arouses almost as much ire as an out-and-out kidnapping and she’s escorted out by two nurses and the stereotypically large security guard. Then she fastens onto another mother-to-be, Lara Collins (Gina Vitori), who ran through a good chunk of her husband Sam’s (Jonathan Stoddard) money on in vitro fertilization. They meet on a Web site called “Bump Buddies” that seems to be for expectant mothers to compare notes about their experiences and offer mutual support. Jamie offers Lara (whose name most of the actors pronounce as the more common “Laura,” by the way) distraction from the ordeal of pregnancy, which in recent years has become more arduous for women than it used to be because of all the solemn warnings that you can’t drink, do drugs, eat non-bland foods or do much of anything while you’re carrying a baby. (There’s a bizarrely amusing segment showing a yoga class for pregnant women in which they do the best they can while their babies-to-be keep getting in the way.) There’s also a mysterious man named “Tony” who keeps appearing in Jamie’s life trying to keep track of her pregnancy and we’re not all that sure who he is until quite late in the running time.

At first Jamie says her due date is August 18 – the same as Lara’s – and she’s ambiguous about who the baby’s father is and what happened to him. At first she says he was a casual boyfriend who bailed on her as soon as she wanted to get “serious,” but then she makes it sound like he’s still alive, then that he died after he knocked her up. Meanwhile, Lara has decided she wants to do a home birth with a midwife named Christine instead of having her baby in the hospital, and since she’s not only got so “sold” on the idea of a midwife birth at home but even convinced her initially dubious husband about it, she recommends Christine to Jamie and even pays for Christine to visit Jamie at home. Big mistake: Christine’s suspicions are aroused when Jamie can’t remember when she said her due date was – “No expectant mother doesn’t know her due date!” she thunders – and then she insists on giving Jamie an exam that involves Jamie raising her top. The moment she does that – in what the filmmakers clearly intended as an enormous shock to the audience, but which was undone by whoever edited Lifetime’s promos for the film – we see she’s not really pregnant at all but is wearing a flesh-colored appliance to make it look like she is. (Harlen Coben’s recent novel The Stranger offers a more effective use of this plot device: a novelty company sells appliances and kits along with instructions on how to fake a pregnancy to women whose marriages are in trouble. The idea is they can win back their husbands’ affections by faking first a pregnancy, then a miscarriage.)

Jamie responds to Christine catching on to her secret by stabbing and killing her (though Murlowski, Martinez and Rockoff don’t supply an explanation of what she did with the body), and Lara wonders why Christine has stopped returning her increasingly frantic phone calls. Soon we catch on that Jamie plans to steal Lara’s baby and supply it to the mysterious broker who’s paid her for a kid – and to encourage the process she goes on the Internet to research substances she can slip Lara to speed up her labor. Ultimately, despite Lara’s doctor’s warning that she get as much bed rest as possible and avoid stress, she lets Jamie talk her into a long drive to see a man who hand-crafts baby furniture – only Jamie fakes car trouble and strands Lara in the middle of nowhere, conveniently out of cell phone range (the advent of cell phones has forced a lot of Lifetime writers to locate their climaxes in out-of-the-way places so the victims can’t call for help), with the idea that forcing her to walk a long distance on a country road under a hot sun will get her to drop her baby so Jamie can take it to the broker and get the rest of her money. Fortunately for Lara, a van passes by and she’s able to flag it down and get a ride into town, where they end up at Jamie’s home and Lara gives birth to a girl there – a bit of a complication because Jamie had promised the baby broker a boy. In the film’s most powerful and suspenseful scene, Jamie literally breaks into Lara’s and Sam’s home and steals the baby, a girl Lara has named Ella and Jamie has named Sophie (who appears, quite frankly, to be played by a doll: it would be ironic if the makers of a movie about a woman faking a pregnancy used a fake baby to represent the real offspring of the actually pregnant character).

Lara, who’d been sleeping fitfully, wakes in time to realize that the baby has gone and she guesses, correctly, that Jamie was the one who took her even though she left a note making it look like the kid was kidnapped for ransom. Fortunately, Lara has both a picture of Jamie and a Black best friend with computer skills who is able to use the photo to trace Jamie on social media and find that Jamie’s real name is Susan Ashe – and the mysterious guy who was after her child is her husband, Anthony Ashe, whose main concerns seem to be whether the baby is actually his (he collects specimens for DNA tests for both himself and the baby, but Jamie – or should I call her Susan? – pockets his specimen and substitutes one she presumably got from Sam, though exactly how she could have obtained it is yet another mystery the director and writers leave unsolved) and whether Susan will agree to enter therapy to deal with her delusions and history of erratic behavior. In the end all three people who want the baby – Lara, Anthony and the thug-like baby broker – converge on Jamie’s/Susan’s home and Lara, given a retractable baton by her Black best friend (who fortunately doesn’t encounter Jamie at all and therefore isn’t in danger of becoming one of Lifetime’s most annoying clichés, The Heroine’s Black Best Friend Who Uncovers The Villain’s Plot But Is Killed Herself Before She Can Warn Her), knocks out (and possibly kills) both the thug and Jamie.

There’s a predictably cutesy-poo tag scene with Lara, Sam and baby Ella at home in which we learn that Sam, who seemed to have responded to the recovery of their baby by getting incredibly horny. I imagined him saying to her, “Now that we’ve got her back, let’s go make another one” – and the film’s final gag is that that’s exactly what they’ve done: after having to resort to IVF to conceive their first child they’ve managed to get a second one au naturel by doing it the fun way. Like Nobody Will Believe You, the film Lifetime “premiered” the night before, Labor of Lies is a pretty clichéd Lifetime movie, well made and with a certain degree of sinister atmosphere from Murlowski’s direction and photography, but traveling along quite well-worn paths for this network. Frankly, I’ve seen considerably better Lifetime movies about the crazy woman determined to have a baby and willing to steal one if she can’t have one on her own – including the still chilling 2006 film Cries in the Dark, in which a woman murdered her 8 ½-months pregnant sister to extract the still-living baby (she’d worked as a nurse so she knew how to perform a D.I.Y. C-section) and raise it as her own (and I also fell in lust with Adrian Holmes, the hot Black actor who played the police detective who investigated the case; in fact on imdb.com’s message boards I pleaded with Dick Wolf and his show runners and writers to cast him in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit when Christopher Meloni left the show – which, alas, they didn’t).