Sister with a Secret, a.k.a. My Missing Sister (Cartel Pictures, Lifetime, 2022)

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

The latest Lifetime movie, which had its “premiere” last night, was called Sister with a Secret, though imdb.com lists that as a working title and claims the final one was My Missing Sister. Like most of the movies so far in their much-ballyhooed “Love, Lies and Seduction” series, it was an O.K. thriller with a premise far less titillating than the publicity had led us to expect. The central characters are Janet (Kelly Sullivan) and her two daughters, Tara (Taylor Foster), who’s just won admission to an exclusive private college in New Jersey even though the family lives in San Francisco (we get that from the large number of stock shots of the Golden Gate Bridge) and Jessica (Grace Narducci), With her raven-black hair Narducci looks like she beamed in from a whole other family than the blonde Janet and Tara, but we’ll let that pass. Janet makes her living in some sort of home-based business in which her partner is her ex-husband Tom (Mark Famiglietti), who we’re carefully told is not the girls’ real father – he presumably died in an accident, though writers Isak Borg and Dena Hysell-Camejo only hint at that. Tara is out jogging at night when she’s attacked by a mysterious figure wearing a black cowl so neither she nor we know who it is (or even what gender they are; one of the usual reasons Lifetime’s writers clad their assailants in hoodies or cowls is to maintain suspense about their gender).

The police, in the person of an African-American detective inamed Roberts (Marc Anthony Samuel), don’t take the family’s report all too seriously. Then Tara is kidnapped and taken to a mysterious room in which she’s chained to a bed – though the bondage only restrains one leg so she’s free to walk around the room as far as the chain stretches – and at first she doesn’t know who’s done this to her or why, though when he enters the room she recognizes him at once and this scene, about a half-hour before the end, at least lets us know that her abductor is someone she knows. Writers Borg and Hysell-Camejo have already given us three main suspects: Ryan Cavalleri (Austin Fryberger), a 25-year-old man Tara met on a dating app and she’s worried her mom and stepdad wouldn’t accept her dating an older man even though he’s not that much older; Alex Cortez (Sam Bixby), a barista at one of the local coffeehouses who sees Ryan grab Tara in anger and tells her she’s better than that and she shouldn’t have to put up with physical abuse; and Tom, who I was starting to think might be the culprit because he may have had a Humbert Humbert-style crush on Tara. The writers do a good job of distributing potential gu9ilt among these three men, though Ryan is eliminated (in both senses of the word) when he gets into his car after having discovered damaging evidence against the real pero, only the real criminal is sitting in his back seat and reaches over and strangles him to death. Later Jessica gets a text from Alex’s phone claiming that he and Tara have run off to Las Vegas together, but that’s not true: the real Alex has been killed by Tom, who turns out to be the killer but even though I guessed at him about when Borg and Hysett-Camejo wanted me to (when he snatched up a secret diary Tara was keeping, offering to take it to Detective Roberts but really intending to destroy it lest it give him away), I had been wrong about his motive.

It turns out he’s never got over the loss of his daughter Mackenzie, who like Tara planned to move across country to attend a prestigious college, fell into a lifestyle of parties and alcohol, and ultimately died in a drunk-driving accident. Now he’s determined to spare Tara that fate no matter how many other guys in her life he has to kill – not only Ryan but also Alex, whom Tom blames for his own death because “he had to try to be the hero” and interrupt him when he kidnapped Tara. (We actually saw Ryan’s death in real time but we only got Alex’s in a flashback, and Tom confused the trail by wiping the sill of Tara’s bedroom window with Alex’s blood so it would look like he was the kidnapper.) Eventually there’s a typical final Lifetime confrontation in which Janet and Jessica confront Tom and, though Tom briefly takes the shovel Jessica has armed herself with and threatens her with it, Jessica ultimately gets it back and beats Tom to death with it. I felt a bit sorry for Tara at the end of Sister with a Secret because even though she had survived and been rescued from her demented stepdad, who had so totally lost it that he was even calling her “Mackenzie” towards the end and Tara was trying to explain to him that the real Mackenzie was dead – both the nice and hot-looking young men in her life were dead. (Frankly, given that the setting is San Francisco I had expected Alex to be Gay and the sort of nonthreatening confidante a lot of straight women find they can tell t heir troubles to.)

Like the previous night’s Lifetime movie, In Love with My Partner’s Wife, Sister with a Secret is a competent thriller that delivers the goods the Lifetime formula promises but not much more than that; the director, Ben Meyerson, is O.K. but lacked even the occasional visual flair Lindsay Hartley had brought to In Love with My Partner’s Wife, and he got similarly professional but nothing-special performances from his cast, though Grace Narducci as the avenging sister Jessica develops some real backbone towards the end. Maybe that’s why the film’s casting director (unidentified on imdb.com) picked an actress who looks so unlike her presumed mother and sister to play the role!