Danger in the House (CME Autum Productions, Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night I watched another Lifetime “premiere,” Danger in the House, and then when my husband Charles came back from work I screened him another YouTobe post, The Brasher Doubloon, the second 20th Century-Fox film based on Raymond Chandler’s novel The High Window. Danger in the House was directed and written by women – Michelle Ouelette and Ansley Gordon, respectively – though in yesterday’s comments on Bodyguard Seduction and how the sensibilities of its female director, Lindsay Hartley, clashed with those of the male screenwriter, Paul A. Birkett, I expressed hope that the next time Lindsay Hartley directs a film it will be with a woman writer. After Danger in the House I express the even more fervent hope that that woman writer not be Ansley Gordon! Gordon cooked up one of those convoluted Lifetime plots in which there’s so much skulduggery of all kinds going on it’s hard to tell which of the plots are important and which are just throwaways or red herrings. The basic plot is – or at least seems to be – about Connor Covington (Jamie Spilchuk) and his fiancée Taylor Hayes (Kathryn Kohut). They’re living in a big house – one that makes the Amberson mansion look like a pied-à-terre – also inhabited by Connor’s mother June (Barbara Gordon – well, I guess she had to do something with her life once she got too old for the Batgirl gig).

Mom and her late husband built up a contracting business that is one acquisition away from dominating the business in whatever city this takes place in (for some reason I got the impression it was Philadelphia even though I don’t recall anything in Ansley Gordon’s script that said so; and I looked up their bios on imdb.com but couldn’t find any indication that Ansley and Barbara Gordon are related to each other). Only dad is dead and mom is suffering from the general debilitation that comes from old age, including a weakness for fainting spells. Knowing that he and Taylor are going to be away from home a lot to complete the acquisition of a family-owned company and fend off another family-owned company that’s making a rival bid, Connor decides he needs to hire a professional caregiver to take care of her. When June has a fainting spell while she, Connor and Taylor are dining out at a fancy restaurant, Nora Reed (Rebecca Liddiard) comes along, gives her first aid and eventually Connor decides to hore Nora as his mom’s caregiver on the spot, especially after Nora says she’s a registered nurse. Connor’s housekeeper Lucy (Cory Reed) is predictably put out by the presence of an arch-rival, but she rather glumly adjusts. Then we see a brief shot of Taylor in the office of Covington Construction making out with the chief financial officer, Rex Veloz (David Pinard),and that’s our first intimation that all is not what it seems between her and Connor.

At the same time Connor is being stalked by his ex, Emma (Alex Jade), who’s trying to give him a mysterious manila envelope containing papers she insists he must see for his own good. There’s also a reporter, Madison Peters (Hayden Rose), who wrote a story about an incident in Greenville, where Nora lived before she took the job with the Covingtons, and Taylor drove out in the middle of the night to pick up a clipping of this story, which is – or at least seems to be – about Nora fleeing town after causing the death of a previous client. And as if those weren’t enough ingredients in Ansley Gordon’s stew pot, Nora herself has an abusive husband, Ben Wyatt (Chris Young), who keeps running into her despite her best efforts to avoid him. When he isn’t physically stalking her, he’s sending her threatening texts saying he’ll kill her mother unless she gets him the combination to the Covingtons’ safe, which contains the priceless jewels June’s late husband bought her. All this is leading to a neck-snapping reversal in which [spoiler alert!] Taylor turns out to be the real villainess of the piece. She’s actually Hannah, daughter of a man who used to work in the Covingtons’ accounting department until he either embezzled a large amount of money from them or was framed by the real crook.

Hannah’s embittered dad raised her to hate the Covingtons and seek revenge on them, which she did by getting the son and heir to fall in love with her while simultaneously seducing the CFO to embezzle over $1 million from the company and stash it in a secret bank account in the Caymans. Now she plots to murder June to get her hands on the Covington fortune and frame Nora for it, after which she’s going to dispose of Connor as well and have the entire fortune for herself. Just how she plans to get away with that one is unclear – and as with previous Lifetime movies in which a woman has to enter into a long-term sexual relationship with a man she can’t stand to ensnare him into one plot or another, I can’t escape the feeling that there’s a certain bizarre kinkiness about the whole idea. A genius director like Alfred Hitchcock could pull off a reversal like this, which changes our point of view towards everything we’ve seen and shows that the characters we thought were good were really evil, and vice versa. In fact, Hitchcock did it magnificently in one of the oddball French-language films, Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache, he made in 1944, after the liberation of France during World War II, to commemorate the Resistance (and he used actors who were in Britain because they had fled the Nazi occupation of France). I forget just which film of the two he pulled off that reversal in, but he and his writers managed to make that totally believable whereas the micro-talents of Michelle Oulette and Ansley Gordon didn’t.