Honor Student (24 Frames Digital Films, Criminal Pictures, Movie Central, Lifetime, 2014)

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

I might have liked Do You Trust Your Boyfriend? better if I hadn’t watched a much better Lifetime movie earlier in the afternoon, a 2014 film called Honor Student directed by Penelope Bultenhuis who won plaudits for her first feature, A Wake, but seems mostly to have been ghettoized in the galleys of TV-movie directors ever since – a pity, since she has a real talent for stories of romantic obsession and makes this one, written by Linda J. Cowgill and old Lifetime hand David DeCrane, come alive. The film opens in a writing class being taught in a women’s prison by a male author, Nicholas Howarth (Niall Matter), who so far has published just one novel, an intellectually serious book that hardly sold. The session we see is the last of the 12-week class, and Nicholas is impressed by a Black woman who has written a story that includes the line, “The night hung over her like a dead man.” But the writer who gets impressed – and then obsessed – with Nicholas is Teresa Smith (Josie Loren), who hasn’t written a word during all 12 weeks of the class but as she’s leaving the last session tells Nicholas of an idea she’s had about a teenage woman college student who had an affair with her much-older literature professor and killed him when he rejected her. Of course we immediately “get” that this is Teresa’s own story and the crime that put her in prison in the flrst place – though we later learn she was only convicted of manslaughter and is serving a relatively short sentence – and then we get a chyron reading “Two years later.”

Two years later Nicholas has turned Teresa’s idea into a best-selling novel called Killer Student and has used the royalty money to buy himself and his wife Lana (Shauna Johannessen) a chicken farm in the rural town of Langley, Washington. Lana is expecting the Howarths’ first child – though like so many Lifetime mothers-to-be she’s already had one pregnancy that ended in a miscarriage and her doctors are worried she’ll lose this baby, too, if she’s subjected to stress. She is also a diabetic with a history of heart disease (apparently no one associated with this project thought to ask writers Cowgill and DeCoteau, “Aren’t you larding it on just a bit?”) and a protective sister named Shannon (Lisa Durant) who becomes a deus ex machina at the end. Aside from the stress of his wife’s pregnancy and various medical conditions, Nicholas is also ‘blocked” on the new novel his editor Erica (Sarah Strange) is expecting from him to capitalize on the success of Killer Student (which he’s still promoting at local book-signings in Seattle). Then suddenly Teresa turns up in his life; she’s been paroled and is working at a local restaurant/diner/coffeehouse/something or other. She comes to Nicholas’s home – and it’s a mystery how she got in, though she is an ex-con after all and probably learned a thing or two about lock-picking along the way – and confronts him. Teresa tells Nicholas, “You stole my life” – meaning, it seems, that now that he’s written and published Killer Student there’ll be no market for her own novel about her life and the professor she knocked off for real – and she demands that he pay her half the royalties from Killer Student as well as doing a joint press conference explaining that the book was her idea, adding her name to future editions as co-author and giving her an equal share of the movie rights. (It’s been well known for some time that the real money in writing pop fiction is selling the movie rights.)

Nicholas is scared about what Teresa’s revelations will do to his reputation as a writer and in particular whether anyone will ever publish anything by him if he gives the press conference she’s demanding. But the shock of the whole incident gets him over his writer’s block and he starts work on a new novel called The First Wife, about two characters who have an illicit relationship but part amicably at the end. Only Teresa isn’t willing to settle for half of Nicholas’s first book, and she sees through his attempts to entrap her into accepting blackmail money and get herself arrested by the local sheriff, Stanton (Michael Hogan), who’s played as the usual stupid doofus small-town sheriff (though Hogan is good enough in the role that if anyone does a remake of Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake and restores the character of the honest county sheriff Chandler meant as a counterpoint to the story’s corrupt city cop, he’d be right for it). Now she’s after his new book, which at first she demands include her name as co-author (with her billed first) and then says she’ll only accept sole billing. She’s made this possible by literally stealing it, erasing the manuscript from his computer and also taking the two flash drives on which he’d backed it up, one at his place and one in the coffeehouse owned by Nicholas’s friend Marcia (Enid-Raye Adams). The debt writers Cowgill and DeCoteau owe to Stephen King’s Misery – also about a best-selling writer held hostage by a crazy woman and forced to write the way she tells him to – is obvious (though of course Josie Lauren is a good deal hotter than Kathy Bates, who played the crazy in the film version of Misery), but Honor Student is actually a quite good thriller, unusually complex (at least for a Lifetime movie) in the cat-and-mouse game Teresa is playing with Nicholas, coming on to him at several points and trying to derail his marriage by making it look to his wife that they’re having an affair.

It comes to an ending unusually preposterous even by Lifetime standards, with Teresa holding Lana, Erica and Marcia hostage and demanding that Nicholas not only put her name on The First Wife as its sole author but change the ending from a bittersweet one to a brutal bloodbath. Teresa confiscates all the cell phones in the house so no one will be able to call out for help, but Lana’s sister Shannon tries to call, gets no answer, and when that happens she calls the sheriff and tells him to go do a welfare check at Nicholas’s home. Teresa hears the sheriff stalking the place and, when he comes in, she shoots and wounds him, but in the meantime Nicholas decides to play writing teacher and, after he finishes the new ending to The First Wife, sits her down at the computer and she starts to write her own novel. It turns out to be good enough that Erica decides to publish it and launches it and Nicholas’s book simultaneously – and at the end Nicholas is doing another book signing promoting both novels while Teresa is back in the prison where she started out the story (actually given her mental state I had imagined she’d be in a psychiatric hospital instead, and be in at least a somewhat more comfortable room than a prison cell and one in which she could continue to write, since she’d earlier said she couldn’t write in the prison environment). I had actually hoped for a Seven Keys to Baldpate-style ending in which the entire story would turn out to be the plot of Nicholas’s latest novel – but there have been a number of Lifetime movies about writers that could have used that twist even more than this one, and their writers (their real ones) haven’t gone there. Still, despite that silly ending, Honor Student is one of the better Lifetime thrillers, with the cat-and-mouse between protagonist and villainess done better than in a lot of other ones we’ve seen, and with Nicholas and Teresa cast with actors alive to the complexities of the story and their characters instead of just giving stick-figure performances in stick-figure roles.