Secrets in the Snow (Almost Never Films, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2020)

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

After Picture Perfect Lies Lifetime showed a year-old movie called Secrets in the Snow which, if anything, had an even more outrageous and unbelievable switcheroo at the end than Picture Perfect Lies. This time the heroine is Christina (Aubrey Reynolds), who lives in Chicago, works as a social worker and for the last three months has been dating Ted Ryant (Travis Caldwell). Ted came from a small town in the snow country (one presumes, given that Chicago was the city he escaped to, it was in either Minnesota or Wisconsin) where his dad Johnathan (Peter Carey) owns a “cider mill” (I didn’t know what that was but it’s a mill for crushing apples to turn them into cider, juice or various “hard” beverages that can be made from apple juice) that’s been in the Ryant family for generations. These days, however, he spends virtually all his time in his house’s basement building models of World War II airplanes (including the Focke-Wulf FW 190, the most fearsome fighter the Luftwaffe had) while his wife Katherine pretty much runs the household. Ted is driving back to wherever from Chicago for Katherine’s annual birthday party, which is usually held at a local tavern (one gag in Patrick Powell’s script is the town is so small that every time someone asks for directions, they’re told, “It’s just down the street”) but this year is going to be at the Ryant home because a ferocious snowstorm is literally keeping people “snowed in.”

Christina quickly notices that there are unspoken secrets among the Ryants, who include Ted’s sister Nicole (Dana Simone) and a rather twitchy guy named Jacob (Russell Bradley Fenton) whose relation to the Ryants wasn’t clear – I would have thought he was a blood Ryant but Powell’s dialogue carefully specified that he wasn’t; then I assumed he was Nicole’s husband (and therefore a Ryant in-law) but they seemed awfully remote for a married couple even in a family that, as I joked during the movie, made Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” seem like a bundle of laughs by comparison. Most of the angst revolves around the mysterious death of Tim’s brother Paul, who fell through the ice on a frozen-over lake two years previously and drowned. HIs death was ruled an accident but some of the Ryants, particularly Nicole, are convinced he was murdered even though they don’t know by whom or why. Things come to a head when Paul’s ex-girlfriend Bonnie (Liz Fenning) shows up – incidentally imdb.com lists her character name as “Angie” but I specifically remember hearing “Bonnie” on the soundtrack, and the name stuck largely because it was the name of my maternal grandmother – courtesy of a mysterious power blackout that has made it impossible for her to stay at her own home without heat or electricity. Christina launches a ham-handed attempt to use her social-work skills on the Ryants and the others, but things backfire big-time. Her calls for everyone to be honest with each other and let go of their secrets provoke Bonnie into admitting that she had an affair with someone else while Paul was still alive, though like a typical American either in movies or in life she felt horrendously guilty afterwards and said it was the worst thing she’d ever done in her life.

After the mephitic closeness imposed upon them by the rotten weather – and Bonnie’s sudden flight to her own home because she’d rather stay there and freeze than endure the hatred and scorn from the Ryants – we get the big reversal [spoiler alert!]: the man Bonnie had the affair with was Paul’s brother Ted, the same man Christina was dating and who brought her into the Ryants’ orbit. What’s more, Ted is still in love with Bonnie and wants her permanently. Just how he thought showing up with another girlfriend was able to win her back remains a mystery, but the rather bland character Travis Caldwell has been playing suddenly becomes a psycho monster who reveals he murdered Paul because Paul stood in the way of him getting together with Bonnie (and of course Powell throws out an obligatory reference to Cain and Abel, though he seems to think Cain killed Abel over a woman instead of jealousy that Abel had won God’s favor and Cain hadn’t). One reason I wasn’t expecting this plot twist is that Taylor Caldwell is easy on the eyes and reasonably attractive but not the drop-dead gorgeous sex magnet Lifetime usually casts as its young male villains. Another reason is that Lifetime almost never tries to make one-half of the young ingénue couple the killer; usually their audience expects them to stay together after someone else in the dramatis personae has tried to kill either or both of them. José Montesinos directed Secrets in the Snow and got some nice Gothic touches into it – notably the opening shot, which shows Paul’s definitely decayed but still relatively intact hand and forearm poking through the whole in the iced-over lake – but he’s at the mercy of Powell’s script, which once you realize that Ted is the killer ends the way you’d expect, with Ted menacing Christina until she gets away from him and his momentum propels him through the same sort of weak spot in the ice over the lake so he drowns just as his brother did. Secrets in the Snow had some nicely macabre bits – it was more engaging than the bare synopsis makes it sound – but it still was hardly Lifetime at its best, or even at its median level of attractive trashiness.