Lies Between Friends (CMV Autumn Productions, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night’s Lifetime movie was soemthingi called Lies Between Friends, which opens with a prologue in which college roommates Steve Bowser and Ollie are having a wild party when Ollie’s then-girlfriend overdoses on pills and dies. Ollie actually brought the pills to the party and he’s worried about the potential legal repercussions – not only his possible prosecution for manslaughter but also the loss of his trust fund and his ability to develop the Internet company he’s planned for based on an idea he and Steve kicked around in school – he somehow gets Steve to take the fall for him. The film then flashes forward about 20 years, and Ollie (Peter Benson) had become a multimillionaire by selling the company he built up with Steve’s idea. Now Ollie is running a new company and he’s about to cash it out, too, but first he feels he needs to expand so he can get a higher price for it. To do that he’s arranged for an investment froma venture capitalist of $2 million/ Ollie is also married to a woman named Claire (Zibby Allen), and they have two children whose ages are in the early double digits. Meanwhile Steve has become an alcoholic; he’s tried to do his own startups but hasn’t been able to get any funding for him. He’s also a widower with a daughter, Emily Bowser (Matreya Scarrwener), who’s just won admission to the prestigious Seattle Tech university but doesn’t have the money to go. She tells her dad that she has a scholarship but it doesn’t cover housing,and given the insane expense of finding and renting a place in Seattle she won’t be able to do. Steve hits on the idea of asking his old college roommate Ollie either to find a place for his daughter or to put her up himself.

When Ollie refuses to take any of his phone calls, Steve actually drives out from his home in Aberdeen (the old oogging community in Washington state that entered rock history as the home town of Kurt Cobain) to Seattle and crashes the office of Ollie’s company. Ollie agrees to take in Emily, enlisting her to baby-sit his kids and drive them to school when both he and Claire (a former attorney who’s trying to launch a new career as an event planner) are too busy to do so. For much of the movie I was hoping for a better film than the one we got; I had the idea director Ann Forry and writer Lauren Balson Carter were interested in creating morally ambiguous characters and presenting the ironies of the situation and keeping Emlly a basically sympathetic character. Instead they turned her into a typical Lifetime psycho villainess. Our first intimation of this us wbeg we see her retaliate against a girl in the elite private school Ollie’s kids attend who’s bullying Ollie’s daughter. Emily calls in a false police report to the effect that the girl’s mother is driving erratically and appears to be on drugs. The cops duly pounce on her and arrest her, leading her away in handcuffs, while her attitude is, “I”m rich! I’m supposed to be above this sort of thing!” Then, on a night when Ollie’s son Charlie is giving a big karate demonstration – an event that’s happened before and Ollie has never seen because he keeps getting too sidetracked by his business to attend – Emily drugs his wine so he falls sick and throws up a lot, and both Ollie and Claire have to miss Charlie’s big night.

About half an hour before the end came the scene in which this movie completely lost me: Emily goes back home to Aberdeen and visits her dad Steve. The two get into an argument, with Steve asking her to drop her elaborate revenge plan against Ollie and Emily insisting that he shouldn’t be allowed to get away with what he did ti Steve. The two get into a shoving match which leads to Steve lying on the floor and bleeding out fatally, while the whole thing was recorded on a video security camera – and director Forry makes sure we get a lot of long, sinister glimpses of it. Emily is able to convince everyone else that Steve died in a drunken accident right after an oddball scene in which Steve crashed Ollie’s meeting with his venture capitalist to outline his idea for a new app featuring virtual cats. Ollie thinks the idea is stupid (and I couldn’t help but agree with him!), but his investor loves it and tells Ollie to acquire and develop it. So Steve got killed by his daughter just as he was about to hit the jackpot. Then Emily hacks into Ollie’s computer and steals the $2 million the investor gave him, moves it into Ollie’s own account and then into a bogus account she’s set up for herself to steal the money. She also steals Ollie’s phone and plants fake evidence that makes it look like Ollie is having an affair with Pam, a Black teacher at Seattle Tech (ya remember Seattle Tech?) who’s Claire’s best friend. (Ya remember Claire?) Claire has already called Seattle Tech and found there is no “Emily Bowser” attending it, and eventually Emily explains that though she was accepted there, she wasn’t able to go because her acceptance letter didn’t include any scholarship money.

The finale occurs when Ollie’s wife Claire stumbles on the security-camera footage of Emily murdering her dad (Chaire has access to the footage because she and Ollie actually bought the house for Steve as a partial settlement for his potential legal claims against them), and Emily catches her and overpowers her. Emily starts to feed her the poisoned wine, this time with enough of a dose it will be fatal, only Ollie crashes into the house and rescues Claire at the last minute. The last scene is a bit ambiguous: Ollie makes a huge annoumcenemt that he’s endowing the Steve Bowser center for the treatment of adult alcoholism and is going to dedicate the revenue from Steve’s virtual-cat app to support it. So he looks like a good guy and we don’t get any view of Emily and what happened to her; presumably she was taken into custody (unmess we’re supposed to believe Ollie s blow to the back of her head with a baseball bat was enough to kill her), but we don’t get the once-obligatory wrap-up scene of Emily in prison still nursing her revenge fantasies and vowing to get back at Ollie and Claire as soon as she gets out. Lies Between Friends could have been a real gem, but as with all too many Lifetime writers and directors, Lauren Balson Carter and Ann Forry just didn’t know when to stop. I wish they had kept Emily basically sympathetic and explained her faults as part of her status anxiety over the people whom she believes, with good reason, wrecked her own father’s life. Instead they led her into all-out Lifetime psychohood, and I felt like we’d been led up the garden path by Emily’s character as she seemed so innocent at first and ended up an amoral monster.