You’re Not Safe Here, a.k.a. The Girl in the Window (Stargazer Films, Beta Film, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night I was waiting up for a Lifetime movie called You’re Not Safe Here – though imdb.com claims the title was later changed to The Girl in the Window for a Canadian theatrical release – about a young woman, Ava (Haskiri Velasquez), who’s just graduated from college and got herself impregnated by her live-in boyfriend Shane (Austin Weyant), who’s also a college graduate but is in the familiar trap of being unable to land a job because all the prospective employers he contacts want someone with “experience.” Frustrated at the looming student loan debt he accumulated getting an education with no apparent value in the work world, he responds by lashing out at his partner, first psychologically and then physically. With just a couple of weeks left to go in her pregnancy, she manages to escape from him via the help of her friend Kyle (Brady Gentry), who loans her his coat and his car and tells her to drive as far away as possible. I assumed his motive was he had a crush on her, and judging from previous Lifetime movies about young people in troubled relationships, I was expecting Kyle to reappear at the end of the narrative and provide a far more pleasant and suitable boyfriend for Our Heroine, but instead Shane cornes to Kyle and demands to know where Ava has gone. Shane beats up Kyle until he tells him – Ava’s plan is to drive to the home of her estranged sister Lila (Sarah Wisser) and stay with her until she has the baby, then see if she can go back to her plan to attend graduate school in drama (her undergrad major) and ultimately become a theatre director – whereupon Shane takes Kyle out permanently by stabbing him repeatedly with a screwdriver.

Meanwhile Ava ends up on a country road in a driving rainstorm and goes off the road, crashing her car into a tree and becoming unconscious. When she comes to she’s in the remote, isolated country house of Dr. William McGlynn (Cleo Anthony), a young-looking hunky Black man whom we get to see shirtless and with only a towel around his waist in the film’s most delectable scene) and his (white) wife Valerie (the chillingly effective Nicky Whelan, top-billed). She’s told that they simply forgot to retrieve her phone from the scene of her crash, and that the storm that caused her accident also blew down all the local cell towers and landlines so there is no phone service to the McGlynns’ house. Gradually she realizes that she’s actually being held prisoner there, and though it takes her some time to realize this, we know from the get-go (especially if we’ve seen the previews for this film, which made it obvious) that the reason they’re holding her captive is they want her baby. Their plan is to hold her until she gives birth, then tell her that the baby was stillborn and send her on her way – only she unravels the plot. First, she hears Will’s phone ring and he answers it and talks to someone – he claims that he was just recording dictation but she knows what that sound really means – indicating that she’s been lied to and she can call her sister and/or the authorities if she can get to a phone. She tries to use the McGlynns’ landline, but Valerie catches her, and the next time she tries she finds Valerie has cut the phone lines.

Ava also realizes that the McGlynns, like the Macbeths, are a basically decent man being driven into crime by a crazy, unscrupulous woman, and they’re living in the country with jobs they can do remotely (he’s a research consultant on health issues and she’s an architect) because they both have dark secrets. Will’s is an addiction to prescription painkillers he picked up during his residency before he became a full-fledged doctor, and he was fired from the hospital where he worked because while he was “under the influence” he tried to operate on a six-year-old boy, botched the operation, the boy died and the hospital was sued for medical malpractice. Valerie’s big dark secret is that she earlier had got pregnant with William’s child but had miscarried, and the doctors who treated her told her that she could never bring a pregnancy to term again. She had already used her architectural skills to remodel a room in her house as a nursery – and rather than repurpose the room for something else (since she’d been told she couldn’t have children au naturel and Will’s history of having accidentally killed a child through medical malpractice wouldn’t exactly recommend them to an adoption agency). Naturally, when she came across an unconscious woman in the late stages of pregnancy shaken up by a car accident but still alive and basically healthy, she regarded it as literally a gift from God and enlisted her husband into her plot to have him deliver the baby, then tell Ava it was dead and send her on her way.

Only Ava stumbles onto the sight of Valerie holding a very-much-alive newborn. “It’s not what you think,” Valerie says, a line that usually gets said by guys whose wives have just walked in on them fucking someone else, but Ava is a good deal smarter than most Lifetime heroines and she knows very well that it is her baby. She demands it back, Valerie says no, and the next thing Ava knows she’s strapped down to an examining table with leather restraints and is being told by Will that it’s necessary. She’s figured out that since they’re not going to give her back her baby, and now that she knows the truth they’re not going to let her leave under her own power, the only alternative they have left to preserve their secret is to kill her. Ava concocts an escape plan that involves getting her restraints loosened enough to drink a glass of water herself instead of having it literally poured down her throat – she’s been sorta-kinda flirting with Will all movie (in that spectacular scene in which we get to see Will topless above the waist and with only a towel on below it, Ava walked up to him and kissed him on the lips, and while he shrugged it off Valerie saw it and got jealous) in hopes he’ll start thinking with his dick instead of Valerie’s twisted brain. She uses her bit of mobility to steal a scalpel (or, as Lionel Atwill would have called it, a “scal-PEL”) and uses it to cut through one of the straps holding her. Then she uses the knockout capsules the McGlynns have been trying to feed her but she’s been saving up for this purpose to “spike” a glass of whiskey Will was using in a toast they were supposedly drinking together and ultimately renders him unconscious. There’s a clever scene from director Rachel Annette Helson (alas stuck with a pretty lame script by three men – Jeremy Hentschel, Anthony Del Negro and Shane O’Brien, the last two of whom also produced) in which Will and Valerie have a sexual “quickie” in the kitchen (though somehow he’s able to screw her with his red undies still on – damn the limits on basic cable!) and she mixes the drug into the drink by banging the glass against the end table, timing her bangs with Will’s thrusts into Valerie and their ecstatic moans so the Couple from Hell don’t hear what she’s doing. She seems to have managed her escape – Will falls unconscious and Ava loosens the strap on her other hand, then starts to flee – only Valerie catches her and holds a gun on her.

Meanwhile Ava’s sister Lila, worried that she called to say she was on her way but never showed up and her calls to Ava keep going to voicemail, determines to trace Ava’s movements and try to find her. Only she decides to take along Ava’s ex-boyfriend Shane, who pretends to be concerned about her when all he wants is to grab the baby (who after all is biologically his!), and we get a nice, ominous close-up of his ass with the screwdriver with which he stabbed Kyle stuck in his waistband. In the end Lila and Shane successfully trace Ava to the McGlynns’ home, only Valerie is waiting for them with her gun. Kyle comes upon Will and stabs him with the screwdriver, then comes upon Ava and Lila in the woods around the house. Valerie is wielding her gun and demands the baby, whereupon Ava throws her the baby’s blanket – which Valerie catches and then realizes is empty. In the confusion, all three reach for the gun and Ava grabs it and shoots Valerie – while Will draws his own gun and, with his dying breath, is able to shoot Kyle just as he tries to steal Ava’s baby. There’s a postlude in which Ava and Lila are living together and raising the baby, a daughter Ava named “Hope” because it seemed appropriate, bringing new meaning to the phrase “Sisters are doing it for themselves.” Ava also announces that the play she’s directing in graduate school is about to open, so she got to go pursue her dreams and also got rid of all the pesky men in her life.

There are some other directions the writers could have pursued – like having Kyle live and pair up with Ava at the end, or (which is where I thought it was going once Kyle was killed) the police suspecting Ava of Kyle’s murder – she was driving his car when the accident occurred, after all – but overall You’re Not Safe Here a.k.a. The Girl in the Window is an O.K. Lifetime thriller, directed beautifully and with a real flair for suspense by Helson but stuck with a typically clichéd script by three men (like some of the other women who’ve got directorial jobs on Lifetime, she deserves a shot at better scripts), though she gets a nice controlled-psycho performance by Nicky Whelan as Valerie and she’s able to give Ava a bit more dimension than the writers intended. The racial politics of this film get a bit muddled, though: the villains are an interracial couple (though that’s just accepted as a normal part of life – whatever’s wrong with them, the fact that he’s Black and she’s white isn’t part of it) while the heroine whose baby they want to steal clearly looks Hispanic while the baby herself (Dallas Coyne) looks white. And Lifeitme seems partial just now to stories about young women who get in car crashes, lose consciousness and are rescued by sinister couples in out-of-the-way houses with malevolent designs on them; tonight’s Lifetime “premiere,” Waking Up to Danger, also seems to have that premise.