Betrayed by My Husband, ak.a. Washed Away (3Brane Entertainment, Buffalo Gal Pictures, Washed Away Manitoba, Lifetime, 2017 or 2020)

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

Indeed, after watching The Virgin Sinners the movie Lifetime showed immediately after it, Betrayed by My Husband, at first seemed an earthbound return to the Lifetime formula. But it got better as it went on and put the heroine, Gabrielle Langston (Emmanuelle Vaugier), into an almost Kafka-esque situation. This film also went through several changes of identity; imdb.com lists it as a 2017 production called Washed Away – a reference to Gabrielle’s husband, Parker Langston (Michael Sirow), apparently dying when his kayak overturns during a whitewater trip – but Lifetime lists 2020 as the date and Betrayed by My Husband as the title (a typically generic Lifetime name). It was directed by Jeff Beesley from a script by Roslyn Muir, and its opening features Parker and Gabrielle celebrating 20 years together (they’ve been a couple long enough to have a teenage daughter, Lexa, played by Rayne Galay) alongside Parker’s brother Carson (Darrell Wall, a tall, thin man with a full beard – a physical “type” Lifetime usually casts as controlling sexist pigs who force their women into a decidedly retro 1950’s version of a perfect relationship) and his wife Brooklyn (Ava Darrach Gagnon). It’s established that Gabrielle was into whitewater kayaking before she married Parker and got him to accompany her on such trips even though he wasn’t terribly interested in them. It’s also established that Parker and Carson are partners in a company called Langston Financial, and that the locale is the San Francisco Bay Area (presumably the characters live in Marin County just north of San Francisco, where I grew up, because they talk about “going to San Francisco” but it’s a short and easy trip for them).

Parker gets lost and apparently drowns on the kayaking trip – the police, headed by Detective Asher Blackton (Cameron Bancroft, who despite his age-worn face and grey hair is easily the sexiest guy in this movie and the one we – or at least I – end up hoping will get together with Gabrielle at the end), recover his kayak and his life vest but not his body. They presume his corpse is stuck behind some rocks on the riverbed and officially pronounce him dead – only a couple of acts later Gabrielle is in San Francisco visiting Fisherman’s Wharf (which is even more kitschy and tourist-trappy than I remember it being when I last lived in San Francisco in the late 1970’s) when she spots Parker in the crowd. She recognizes him and calls out to him, but he disappears again before she can approach him and he doesn’t respond to her. Genna (Kristen Harris), Gabrielle’s friend and insurance agent, comes to Gabrielle’s office (she has a separate career but we’re not really sure what it is) and tells her that just before he disappeared Parker upped their insurance to $5 million and switched the beneficiary on Langston Financial’s insurance policy from Carson to her. Only just before Gabrielle is scheduled to receive the $5 million windfall – which came as a total surprise to her – she’s accosted in a stairwell in the building that houses Langston Financial by a man named Travis (Adam Hurtig), who claims that Parker owed him $200,000 and he demands it immediately or he’ll kill both Gabrielle and her daughter Lexa (ya remember her daughter Lexa?). Meanwhile Gabrielle’s former brother-in-law Carson starts drinking heavily and his wife Brooklyn (who’s usually referred to as “Brooke” for short, maybe because even Roslyn Muir realized that naming her after a borough in New York sounded silly – I can imagine Charles asking, “Does she have sisters named Manhattan, Bronx, Queens and Staten?” I just repeated that to Charles and he said, “And her twin brothers Jamaica and Plains aren”’t happy about the whole thing either") shows up with a bruise on her cheek she says she got when he hit her in a drunken rage.

When Gabrielle goes to Carson’s house to confront him, she sees him slumped over a table with bottles of booze in front of him and at first she thinks he’s collapsed in an alcoholic stupor – only when she pulls him back she sees a knife stuck in his chest and realizes he was murdered. Just then Detective Blackton shows up and arrests Gabrielle for Carson’s murder. Once she’s bailed out she tries to get Brooklyn to help her – of course Brooklyn blames her for her husband’s murder and refuses to have anything to do with her – and she also goes to see her former mother-in-law, who’s had custody of Lexa since Gabrielle’s arrest and has become convinced Gabrielle killed both her sons, including murdering Parker and faking it to look like an accident to collect the insurance money (which was electronically removed by a hacker from Gabrielle’s bank account almost as soon as it showed up). She tells Gabrielle she’s called Child Protective Services to start the process of having Lexa taken away from her. Desperate, Gabrielle manages (surprisingly easily) to sneak into the Langston Financial offices and grab the folder listing their property holdings in the San Francisco Bay Area. Tracing the various locations, she ultimately stumbles on an auto salvage yard where Parker is hiding. Brooklyn is there and Parker explains that he fell in love with his sister-in-law, she made him feel younger and they planned to start a new life together by faking his death, collecting the insurance money and fleeing to the Caymans with it – only Travis shows up and Brooklyn double-crosses Parker, telling him that Travis is the guy she loved all along and she knew (and dated) him even before she married Carson. Travis is also an enforcer for the Mob and his frequent visits to Parker’s office to collect money – documented in Parker’s office calendar with a big letter “T” – because, desperate to keep the failing Langston Financial in business, Parker had borrowed $2 million from a Mob-connected loan shark and Travis was the debt collector. In the end Detective Blackton shoots Travis just before he’s about to kill Gabrielle, Travis wounded Parker but he’ll survive, the capture of Brooklyn and Parker will help the law prosecute the loan-sharking ring, and in a tag scene Gabrielle takes Lexa out on her first kayaking trip (on a beginner’s pond) and Detective Blackton shows up to ask Gabrielle for a date (yum!). Betrayed by My Husband is a pretty generic Lifetime title for a pretty generic Lifetime movie, but the sheer intensity with which director Beesley and writer Muir pile on the complications and put Gabrielle in an almost Kafka-like predicament makes this one “special” and unusually entertaining.