Dying to Belong (Wishing Floor Films, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was pretty much the same-old same-old: it was called Dying to Belong and, though I’m somewhat surprised they didn’t use the “S-word” in the title, it was about a sorority. The plot description on imbd.com – “Olivia meets Riley, a shy freshman who suffers from anxiety. Riley's mother Katherine [is] a legacy Pi Gamma Beta. Sensing the opportunity, to write a story about hazing practices, Olivia discovers secrets involved in the ‘sisterhood’” – made me wonder if I’d seen it before. It had a couple of interesting variations on the theme – the mother, Katherine O’Connor, is played by Shannen Doherty, a name I’d otherwise encountered only in a Lifetime movie about her, The Unauthorized “Beverly Hills, 90210” Story, in which Samantha Munro played her. She was one of those celebrities who developed enough of a bad-girl reputation I registered the name back then even though I never watched Beverly Hills, 90210 or anything else she might have been on. Today’s Shannen Doherty is short and compact – Jenika Rose, who plays Elizabeth’s daughter Riley, towers over her in their scenes together – and her performance is unimpressive in the film’s first half but rises in intensity and power in the second half. The other surprises in this movie are that the heroine is Black – Olivia Rivera (Favour Onwuka), who when we first meet her seems to be set up to be The Heroine’s African-American Best Friend Who Catches On to the Villain’s Plot But Is Killed Before She Can Warn Her – and that Riley, who seems at first to be the heroine of the story, is killed at the midpoint of the film.

Riley O’Connor wants to pledge the Pi Gamma Beta sorority because her mom went there in her own college days – the school is called “Anders University” and it was founded in 1932. It’s also established that Riley has a mental illness called “generalized anxiety disorder” and is on meds for it, and at one point Riley finds that someone has discovered her meds and put blue-green markings on the outside of the bottle. Indeed, the sorority girls are shown as such good spies on each other and the adults around them – including the boys at the brother fraternity from whom they get most of their dates – that the CIA could do worse than hire them en masse once they graduate. Olivia befriends her but the real reason she wants to join the sorority is she’s hoping to make it as a writer on the Anders school paper and figures she’ll infiltrate a sorority to document their hazing rituals even though the school’s official position is that no hazing is going on. Well, of course, the school’s official position is a load of crap: not only is hazing going on at Pi Gamma Beta but it’s being run by a particularly ruthless and sadistic piece of work named Paige (a nice villainess performance by Heidi Bauman), who seems to be in training to become Cruella de Vil. Nominally the sorority’s student president is Jasmine Foyle (Veronica Long), but she pretty much goes along with whatever Paige wants to do to the would-be sorority sisters, including making them walk across broken glass (one girl says she can’t do that because she’s a dancer and doesn’t want to risk injuring her feet, and she’s summarily dismissed from the sorority; later it turns out that they put covers over the glass so it’s not that dangerous, but of course the poor girl who refused and got kicked out didn’t know that) and climbing a two-story wall of wooden beams with a few hand-holds on the way.

On the fatal night Paige challenges Olivia to a drinking contest with cranberry juice spiked with vodka – only Olivia’s is spiked with far more booze than Paige’s (recalling the way that when Charles Manson did drugs with his followers he always kept his doses lower than the ones he gave them so he could remain in overall control) and she ends up passing out. Then Paige takes out Riley and Mya (Jackie Wong), another girl who’s trying to get into the fraternity and who’s taken a dislike to Riley because she figures they’re competing for the last slot and only one of them will get in, and while they’re both drunk Paige orders Mya to climb the wall and Mya panics and gets stuck. Riley goes up to rescue her (though we don’t learn this until a flashback at the end depicting what happened), and Mya lives but Riley falls off the wall and dies. Needless to say, overnight this turns Riley’s mother Katherine from proud Pi Gamma Beta alumna to avenging angel, determined to find the truth about what happened to her daughter, whose death is being ruled a suicide caused by her mental illness. Olivia had meanwhile discovered that this isn’t the first death that’s happened during the Pi Gamma Beta initiations; in 2019 a girl named Daphne also died while being hazed, and she manages to trace and interview Daphne’s former boyfriend Gabriel (William Matzhold) to get information on what really happened to her. The school’s dean is a harried Black woman who was in Pi Gamma Beta herself and insists the sorority is not to blame for Riley’s death; instead of allowing the police officer assigned to investigate the case, Detective Singh (a woman who doesn’t look particularly East Indian, by the way), to interview the Pi Gamma Beta girls individually, the dean sets up a group meeting and they all – including Olivia, who knows better – insist that there’s no hazing going on at the house.

At one point Olivia is attacked by two people wearing hoodies who put bags over the heads of her and the nice Black guy she’s been dating after they met in the college bookstore (by coincidence I met my first boyfriend in a college bookstore), and one of them smashes Olivia’s cell phone and strands her in the middle of nowhere, forcing her to get back on her own. But she’s recorded the whole interaction on a voice recorder and captured the two boys – one of whom is an ostensible friend named Logan – saying that they were doing this at the behest of the sorority to scare Olivia into stopping her investigation and letting the cover-up that Riley killed herself stand. Eventually Olivia plays her incriminating recording for Jasmine and Paige – one wonders why they don’t grab it from her and destroy her device the way the guys they hired to attack her and her boyfriend did with her cell phone (I expected them to do just that and then for Olivia to tell them, “Sorry, but I backed it up to the cloud”), and eventually the sorority sisters are exposed even though there’s no real indication they’ll suffer any major consequences from their action. Olivia gets her big scoop for the school paper, though – and it’s headlined with the title of the movie, “Dying to Belong.” Dying to Belong has some interesting variations on the Lifetime trope, and director Gail Harvey and writer Caitlin D. Fryers do their jobs effectively and get great performances from their cast. Harvey also has a real sense of atmosphere that’s able to turn the old but functional building the sorority is housed in into a veritable haunted house, and she makes the attack on Olivia genuinely tense and thrilling. It’s just that we’ve seen so many of these things before – sorority hiding a terrible secret (either lethal hazings or trafficking their members to old rich guys in exchange for donations to the college) and finally getting exposed – it was hard, despite good direction, acting and (within the limits of the formula) writing, to get too excited about this one.