Home, Not Alone (Hybrid, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (March 26) my husband Charles and I watched a pretty ordinary Lifetime movie called Home. Not Alone – a title considerably more creative than anything in the actual film, written by Jeffrey Schenck, Peter Sullivan and Adam Rockoff (all old Lifetime hands) and directed by Amy Barrett (so once again you have a Lifetime film directed by a woman but written by a man – in this case by three men, with Schenck and Sullivan supplying the “original” story and Rockoff the script). It’s basically a compendium of Lifetime clichés based on the idea that a man who’s lost his family home (his ancestral home, it turns out, since his grandfather built it during Prohibition and equipped it with a speakeasy in the basement, and his family had lived there until they lost the place through foreclosure, though unless he’d taken out a home equity loan, there’s no reason there should be a mortgage on the place and a continued need to make house payments) simply refuses to leave. Instead he creates a hideout within the house and bedevils the new owners, Sara Wilson (Andrea Bogart) and her 18-year-old daughter Jordyn (Maya Jenson) – at least that’s how the name is spelled on the film’s imdb.com page. Sara moved herself and Jordyn across the country – it’s unclear from the writing committee where they started from but it’s all too clear the house of doom is in Santa Barbara – to get away from her abusive ex-husband Frank (Elijah Majar), who wants to have a relationship with Jordyn which Jordyn is totally uninterested in resuming.

The one even remotely creative thing the writers did with this one was to have Colin Murray (Adam Huss, not bad-looking but not drop-dead gorgeous either), the man who lost the house through foreclosure and is secretly living inside, also date Sara Wilson and come close to seducing her, though their relationship doesn’t quite make it to the bedroom. Colin claims to be a building contractor and to have a place of his own, though he says he’s too embarrassed by it to invite Sara there. He gives her a business card and tells her to call him if there’s anything wrong with the house, and she hears odd noises which Colin at first says were pests which he says he can get rid of. The audience learns that Colin is Sara’s and Jordyn’s mystery stalker well before Sara realizes that herself. Jordyn has a boyfriend of her own, Noah Ryan (Luke Meissner, who’s drop-dead gorgeous and has great pecs; he did a lot more for me than the twink types that usually get these sorts of roles in Lifetime movies). There are a few Lifetime clichés Schenck, Sullivan and Rockoff avoided – when the house turned out to be split-level and there was a long flight of stairs between them, I immediately assumed the writers were going to have someone either fall or be pushed down those stairs, and it didn’t happen. Nor did they have the scapegrace villain Colin knock off Frank Wilson, something they’ve pulled on previous Lifetime movies as well as in the mainstream film Sling Blade, which I remember resenting for suggesting that there’s no way a woman can get out of an abusive relationship with a man besides having the town psycho knock him off for her.

But they eagerly embraced the Lifetime cliché of the heroine’s African-American best friend – here Sara’s co-worker Lucy (Alicia S. Mason) – who learns of the villain’s dastardly plan but is foiled and put out of commission before she can warn the heroine. At least this time Colin only clobbers her with a frying pan and she survives, albeit stuffed in a secret closet that was one of the old 1920’s hideaways built into the house to foil Prohibition agents. This film also suffers from what I call the Lured trap – the unconscionably long time it takes for the heroine to learn that her principal associate is the villain who’s making her life miserable. I call it the Lured trap after the marvelous 1947 film noir Lured, which starred George Sanders as a London theatrical impresario and Lucille Ball as the chorus girl who’s used by Scotland Yard to lure a serial killer who preys on young attractive women after sending them notes of doggerel inspired by Beaudelaire. It’s a great movies and one of the astounding examples of how good an actress Lucille Ball could be in serious dramatic roles (as are Dance, Girl, Dance, The Big Street, DuBarry Was a Lady and the 1949 Easy Living); her talents were far broader than you’d think if you just know her from her TV work. But what I call the “Lured trap” occurs at the end, when Sanders’ character is arrested for the killings because the notes were typed on his typewriter – and he never stops to think that his roommate, the only other person with access to that typewriter, could be the killer. In Home, Not Alone Sara likewise never stops to suspect that Colin could be her mystery stalker – and even Jordyn, who doesn’t like him (at one point, in Sara’s momentary absence, he took Jordyn aside and literally accused her of disrespecting the house and being morally unfit to live in it) and finds the thought of her mother having an affair with this creep gross, never suspects him either.

He’s only “outed” when the Black police detective investigating Sara’s reports finds his secret hiding place within the house, including a snow globe containing the text of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which Sara had given Colin as a novelty item. Eventually the police arrest Colin, but there was one more act still to go, and I guessed correctly that it would involve the creepy woman realtor, Kendall Jones (Jamie Bernadette). She had arranged for an out-of-town buyer to take the house off the Wilsons’ hands and give them a 20 percent profit, but once Colin is in custody the Wilsons decide not to sell – and Kendall goes berserk at that news. It turns out she was the so-called “out-of-town buyer” and she wanted the house back because a large corporation was planning to build a huge campus for its workers and the property the house was on was going to be its centerpiece. In the end Kendall gets drowned by Sara in self-defense as the two wrestle for Kendall’s knife in the house’s indoor swimming pool (a set I remember from at least one previous Lifetime movie) and she and Jordyn end up in a new, equally nice house. Home, Not Alone was a movie all too predictable, at least if you’ve seen more than about three or four Lifetime movies im your own lifetime, and it delivered the goods but nothing more – though I wondered about the possibilities for a sequel in which it turns out Colin and Sara did have sex together, he got her pregnant, and when he either is released or escapes from prison comes looking for her to get their baby back.