Nobody Will Believe You (Reel One Entertainment, Sunshine Films, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was a production from Reel One Entertainment and Sunshine Films (it was made in Georgia and set in Savannah) called Nobody Will Believe You, and it was pretty typical fare from the Pierre David-Tom Berry axis of Lifetime producers. Melanie Baxter (Jenna Rosenow) and her daughter Hannah (Emily Topper) have relocated to Savannah following the sudden departure of Hannah’s dad, who tore off to Florida (presumably with a newer and younger mate) and left them. She’s been able to acquire a nice house (writer Samuel Hayes doesn’t tell us whether they’re buying or renting) and Hannah has to start her senior year of high school at a new school. So naturally Hayes and director Damian Romay (whom I’ve been impressed by before, though this is not one of his better efforts; it’s competent and workmanlike but not particularly suspenseful or scary) trot out all the Tom Brown’s School Days clichés about the new girl in school, including her rejection by the school’s “in” crowd led by Amber (Grace Lawell), the egomaniacal captain of the school’s cheerleading squad; her adoption of Zoë Smith (Lauren Ledger), a heavy-set fellow student with blue streaks in her otherwise long blonde hair – she’s the most charismatic person in the movie, actually, and I hope to see more of her even though as a “woman of size” she’ll be difficult to cast in future roles – as her best friend, and her encounters with teachers.

Among other things, Hannah is an aspiring concert pianist, only she has dire warnings about the school’s music teacher, Mr. Kurtz (Lowrey Brown), if only because usually Lifetime men with triangular faces and closely cropped beards are retro guys with highly superior attitudes towards women. The one adult who seems to give a damn about Hannah besides her mom is the school’s guidance counselor, Garrett Williams (John William Wright), who’s so gooey and unctuous about her that half an hour into the movie I had correctly identified him as the villain. First he kidnaps Amber’s stepfather – we see him (actually someone in the obligatory Lifetime black hoodie, so we don’t see it’s him) Tase the guy in a basement – and kills him, though he’s able to fool the cops by making it look like suicide. Then he attempts to push a loose section of the school’s roof onto one of the girls – Hannah pushes Amber away and saves her life from the errant cornice but any hope that Amber will bond over her ends when Hannah tries out for the cheerleading squad, falls flat on a piece of muddy ground and sees her fall “go viral” as Amber posts it to everybody’s cell phones. What’s more, Amber hacks Hannah’s phone and steals copies of all her physically revealing pictures, causing Hannah to get a reputation on campus as “easy” and driving a wedge between her and her potential boyfriend Tanner (Derrick Clowes), who says he was “saving himself” for the “right” girl, thought Hannah might be it but now realizes she isn’t. Meanwhile, mother Melanie has opened a (legitimate) massage parlor and spa and invites Garrett to be her first customer – which he accepts, though she doesn’t realize he’s merely using her to set up an alibi. He’s planning to kill his wife Eleanor (whom we never see except as a corpse in her kitchen, which Hannah discovers) and frame Hannah for the crime, and part of his plot is to turn the thermostat in his home to 90 degrees so it will screw up the authorities’ ability to estimate the time of death.

So he kills his wife and then shows up at Melanie’s workplace for a massage, establishing what looks like an unbreakable alibi. What’s more, he gives Hannah a ruby pendant he said he was planning to give to Eleanor – only he then reports it to the cops as stolen and the cops go so far as to arrest Hannah for Eleanor’s murder. From then on the only points of suspense are how it will all get unraveled and what Garrett’s motive was – which is that he had the hots for the cheerleader captain Amber, and wanted to get rid of his wife so he could be with her. It turns out that Eleanor was a 17-year-old cheerleader and Garrett a 31-year-old educator when they got together – though at least he was attentive enough to the law that he waited until she turned 18 before he actually fucked her – and as a husband she was so controlling and such a monster to live with that she turned to Kurtz and had an affair with him, though he broke it off when he learned she was married (and had a daughter, Katie, played by Mia Romay – presumably the director’s daughter – whom Hannah had given piano tutoring to and who’s the character you really feel for at the end: it must be traumatic to have to deal with the knowledge that your dad killed your mom, and it’s unclear whom she ends up with at the end). At one point in the action Kurtz packs up all his stuff and prepares to quit his job and move out of town, though at the end not only does he decide to stay after all but there’s a hint he’s going to start dating Hannah’s mom Melanie (ya remember Hannah’s mom Melanie?). Nobody Will Believe You isn’t the Kafka-esque nightmare I was expecting from the title and the promos (which went out ot their way to build up Kurtz as the villain so he’d be a more effective red herring when you watched the show itself); instead it’s a competent, workmanlike Lifetime movie that hits all the expected cliché buttons but doesn’t do anything really creative with the Lifetime tropes – and Garrett is depicted as so nice and perfect John William Wright doesn’t have much to work with in the way of portraying a psycho.