Waking Up to Danger (Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night my husband Charles and I watched another Lifetime movie, Waking Up to Danger, which judging from the promos seemed to be awfully similar to the “premiere” they’d shown the night before, You’re Not Safe Here. Both centered around a woman who’s involved in a car crash (merely an accident in You’re Not Safe Here but caused by deliberate sabotage in this one) who comes to and finds she’s at the center of some nasty intrigues. But whereas the victim in You’re Not Safe Here was a recent college graduate fleeing an abusive relationship and in the final stages of pregnancy, in Waking Up to Danger the woman is Ariana Moore (the racially ambiguous Donna Benedicto), who’s been married to her husband Rick (Hamza Fouad, who despite his Arab-sounding name definitely registers as Black) for about a decade. They have an eight-year-old daughter named Isabel (imdb.com doesn’t have a page on this movie at all and meaww.com only lists the three principals, but this film’s casting director managed to find a mixed-race girl who looks credible as the offspring of her two movie parents) and Ariana’s mom – variously called Liz, Lizzy and Lucy – definitely looks Asian and we’re told she’s Filipina.

The villainess is Ariana’s supposed best friend, a blonde white woman named Jordan (Erin Kathleen Boyer) who had an affair with Rick during the three months Andrea was in the hospital under a medically induced coma while her bones healed from her accident. Actually we get hints that they were actually seeing each other – or at least interested in each other – before Ariana’s accident, and we gradually get the impression (though writer John Hayes never definitively establishes it) that Jordan was the mysterious individual who sabotaged Ariana’s car, cutting its brake line so she’d have that accident in the first place. (She was wearing the obligatory hoodie that hides not only her face but her gender, which has become standard equipment for Lifetime assailants precisely so writers can build up suspense as to whether it’s a bad guy or a bad girl.) When Ariana comes to she finds out that she was in a coma for three months and she has to re-learn how to walk and other basic motor skills. She’s also forgotten great chunks of her past, though they start coming back to her as she recovers and eventually she realizes that her marriage was on shaky ground before the accident, she’d suspected her husband of having one or more affairs and she’d been on the point of leaving him when her accident occurred, though after she regained consciousness everyone around her – including her mom as well as Jordan and all the staff at the hospital – has been telling her how wonderful Rick has been and how committed he’s been to helping her recover.

Meanwhile, Jordan continues on her merry way, ingratiating herself with daughter Isabel and spoiling her (while at the same time upbraiding Ariana for giving the girl too many sweets. Obviously, like so many previous Lifetime villainesses, she’s trying to worm her way into Isabel’s heart and thus pull her emotionally away from her real mom. She’s also still sending Rick sexy texts, and at one point Ariana overhears Jordan and Rick talking about their affair – though that doesn’t stop Ariana from taking Jordan’s advice to leave Rick and move in with her mom. Only Jordan tries to kill mom, too, by spiking her drink with drugs so she’ll pass out while driving and have a presumably fatal accident (staging car crashes seems to be Jordan’s favorite mode of murder, even though she’s not very good at it – of all the people she tries to kill in this movie, none of them actually die). Mom ends up in the same hospital as Ariana was in when she was comatose – Charles joked, “They ought to set up a special wing just for this family,” and I joked back, “Or at least give them a quantity discount” – and they find she had drugs in her system, though enough time elapsed they weren’t able to figure out exactly what she was dosed with or when she might have got it. The finale comes when Jordan, whom the principal at Isabel’s school thinks is her nanny, signs her out of school early, actually to kidnap her and threaten to kill her unless Rick definitively leaves Ariana for her. She brings a gun and actually shoots Rick, but then she and Ariana struggle for the gun and finally, just as Jordan is about to shoot Ariana, the police come (just who called them and how did they know where to go? For that matter, how did Ariana know where to go when she realized Jordan had kidnapped Isabel?) and shoot Jordan, though in the end Rick, Andrea, Isabel and the Asian mother-in-law are happily reunited and Jordan survives but is locked into a prison mental ward in a copy of the great scene that ends Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (I joked that she’d be saying, “I wouldn’t even hurt a fly!”) but, like so many of Hitchcock’s innovations, has become worn through overuse.

Waking Up to Danger is an O.K. Lifetime movie but it suffers from comparison to You’re Not Safe Here: aside from an addiction to overhead shots (mostly of cars leaving the Moores’ driveway) director Troy Scott is a competent traffic cop, hardly at the skill level of You’re Not Safe Here director Rachel Annette Helson; and though Hamza Fouad is pleasant and easy on the eyes he’s hardly the hot stud Cleo Anthony was in the previous film. (Ironically, we were supposed to distrust Fouad’s character because he was cheating on his wife, while what made Anthony’s a villain was he was too loyal to his wife.) The scripts of both movies hewed closely to the clichés on deposit in the Lifetime writers’ bank, but the one thing I will say for Waking Up to Danger is that it really does a good job of dramatizing Ariana’s recovery: the ordeal of physical therapy, the difficulty of learning to walk all over again, the temptation to resort to wheelchairs or crutches when the going gets too rough, and her ultimate sense of triumph when she overcomes the burden and actually starts moving more or less reliably under her own power again. Unfortunately, Erin Kathleen Boyer’s villainess character is simply annoying: it’s only in the last half-hour that she gets to drop the mask and give us the sort of florid scenery-chewing we’ve come to expect from the bad people in Lifetime movies – though Nicky Whelan in You’re Not Safe Here has it all over Boyer and made her villainess character more chilling precisely by underplaying the role and offering a matter-of-fact reading of her character.