Big Lies in a Small Town (CMV Lakeside Productions, Champlain Media,Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday evening I watched two films on Lifetime that turned out to be unusually good – not in the sense of breaking new ground with their formulae but at least telling familiar Lifetime stories in a welcome new way. The first was last night’s “premiere,” Big Lies in a Small Town, directed by Danny J. Boyle (who uses his middle initial so he won’t be confused with the other Danny Boyle, the Academy Award-winning director of Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting) and co-written by him and Nicholas Jackson (they worked together on the original story and Jackson turned it into a script on his own). It stars Rhonda Dent as Rachel Baker, who as the film opens is driving her daughter Hannah (Kristina Paras) to her first day of college (the film is set in Washington state, and the famous forest scenery for which Washington is known is very much a part of this movie). They stop at a convenience store on the way and attract the decidedly unwelcome attentions of two men, a large thug-type with a bulldog face and a smaller, better-looking man.

Then the Bakers get back on the road in their red mini-SUV and find themselves being chased by a big black car whose driver is trying to force them off the road. Ultimately they crash into the car and Hallah ends up in a local hospital, where the medical personnel insist that she was alone in the wreckage and there was no daughter. The crash is investigated by the local sheriff, who tells Rachel in no uncertain terms to bug off and go back where she came from. Of course Rachel refuses, saying that she’s not leaving the little town until either she finds her daughter Hannah alive or, if Hannah is dead, at least learns what happened to her. Rachel’s car is towed to a local garage owned by Gus, a grey-haired, full-bearded man who works as a mechanic and has an overbearing manner and a hair-trigger temper. The Boyle-Jackson script drops dark hints that sinister goings-on are happening, and in particular that other teenage girls that were traveling with their single mothers (we’re eventually told that Rachel’s husband, Hannah’s dad, died when Hannah was still a very young girl and Rachel has been raising her as a single parent since).

We even get a typical Lifetime prologue showing a teenage girl being abducted and killed when she won’t comply with the demands of her kidnappers, whatever they are, and a “One Week Later” Lifetime chyron before we meet the story’s principals. My first thought was there was a human-trafficking ring operating in town and it was being protected by a corrupt sheriff and a lot of local townspeople who seemed to have more of a sinister motive than just the usual we-don’t-want-outsiders-here attitude of people who live in small towns (especially movie small towns). About the only people on Rachel’s side are Mark (Matt Hamilton), who runs the local motel and rents Rachel a room; and Nurse Grace Ross (Natalie von Rotsburg, an oddly Teutonic name for a Black actress), who finds a bracelet at the accident site and realizes it’s the one surviving piece of evidence that confirms that Rachel’s daughter Hannah really existed and was in the car with her when it crashed. Only she’s brutally murdered by the two thugs we saw in the opening sequence, and the killers take the bracelet away so there’ll be no physical evidence of Hannah’s existence. (So, even though they’ve only recently met, Grace takes on the stereotyped LIfetime role of The Heroine’s Black Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot But Gets Killed Before She Can Warn Her.)

The mystery killers also dispatch Gus’s chief mechanic, Jake, a Black man who had earlier suggested they take the black paint scrapings off Rachel’s car and send them to Seattle for forensic analysis, since it’s a color only used by two different manufacturers and he thinks it can be used to trace the killers’ car – only Gus cuts the brake lines of Jake’s car and he dies in the ensuing crash. As for Mark, he explains his sympathy for Rachel’s plight by saying he also had and lost a teenage daughter, not through death but because he and his daughter’s mom went through a bitter divorce and mom turned the girl against him. Then Hannah herself recovers her cell phone long enough to call Rachel, only she’s quickly overpowered by whoever kidnapped her and Rachel has the chilling experience of hearing her daughter in trouble without being able to do anything to save her. Rachel traces her daughter’s cell-phone signal to a deserted stretch of forest where she finds a mummified body, only it turns out it’s not Hannah. Presumably it’s the young girl we saw murdered in the prologue. Rachel ultimately traces Hannah to the home of the better-looking of the two thugs, whose own daughter was killed in a car accident and who’s been looking for a replacement so his wife can regain her will to live, only working together Rachel and Hannah are able to subdue the bad guys and escape, while the sheriff redeems himself by taking the killer couple in custody.

Writers Boyle and Jackson drop hints throughout the movie that Mark himself may be up to no good and part of the plot against Hannah – in one scene Rachel is warned by Mark’s ex-girlfriend Kerry (Ashley Alexander), a waitress at the local diner, not to get romantically involved with Mark (the attraction is definitely there but the parties don’t go through with it), and there’s also an odd scene in which Mark goes through Rachel’s belongings (she left her purse in the car Mark had loaned her when he didn’t need it himself) and lovingly fingers her driver’s license. In the end, though, Mark turns out to be as good as it seems even though he decides to sell the local motel and buy a similar one in Florida just to get out of town. The final scene shows Rachel actually getting Hannah to college … six months later. Big Lies in a Small Town is an effective Lifetime melodrama, well directed by Boyle, who also gets tough, subtle performances from his leads even though he doesn’t do much with the other cast members: Gus in particular turns out to be a one-dimensional thug villain and the couple at the center of the intrigue are just dull. But the film has some nicely Kafka-esque scenes of the predicament Rachel finds herself in, as well as the Lady Vanishes–ish gimmick of the heroine being told she didn’t have a daughter and hallucinated her existence. (Then again, there has been another Lifetime movie in which a mother is driving her young daughter to college, only the whole thing is an hallucination and in that film the daughter is already long since dead.)