Hidden Murder Island (Sunshine Films Florida, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Fortunately the next Lifetime movie, despite an even tackier title – Hidden Murder Island – was actually quite good, a tightly-knit thriller directed by Damián Romay from a script by Richard Lister that, despite a typically hysterical (in both senses) Lifetime ending, moved along well and offered multidimensional characters. It takes place on Moriah, an island off the coast of Florida, and the central characters are the Connollys: father Frank (Donny Boaz, who’s neither drop-dead gorgeous or homely but somewhere between the two, like a real person), mother Beth (Andrea Bogart, top-billed) and daughter Fey, nicknamed “Ferdie” by her dad (Allie Forsberg). In the film’s backstory Fey had been out on the beaches of Moriah with her close friend Maddie Wu, daughter of the local sheriff Joe Wu (Carlos Guerrero), until Maddie apparently shot herself. Maddie died and Fey was left on the island for days without food or water until she was rescued by a young man named Curt Dupress (Zach Lane). Frank Connolly keeps inviting Curt for dinner, announcing he considers Curt part of the family, and apparently trying to match-make Curt and Fey – only Fey doesn’t like Curt. She sees him as a stalker and couldn’t be less interested in him, despite her dad’s insistence that she literally owes her life to him. Fey is suffering from what her doctor, Dr. Devi (Matthew Williams), says is post-traumatic stress disorder; he’s recommended a woman psychotherapist who lives on the mainland but Frank flatly and absolutely refuses to let Fey see her. Complicating the drama are the prestige of the Connolly name on Moriah – Frank’s grandfather built the resort on the island that’s its principal source of income and he carries the weight of it with him and insists that neither Beth nor Fey be allowed to do anything to cast shame on it or show the world that their family isn’t anything but the picture-perfect one he presents to the world – and also the island’s isolation. The only routes between Moriah and mainland Florida are a ferryboat and a drawbridge that is raised for the night at 10 p.m.; once the bridge goes up and the boat stops running, you’re stuck there until the next morning.

Fey wants to get off the island and live a normal life somewhere else, and to that end she’s applied to go to college at New York University – only dad has made it clear that he doesn’t want her to leave, and if she wants to attend college she should do so at the local community college which the Connolly family endowed. While visiting the campus Fey meets Black student Ali Preet (Anmalya Delva), who becomes her friend even though Frank does everything in his considerable power to keep them apart. Though Lister doesn’t come right out and say it, he drops plenty of hints that Fey is a Lesbian and first Maddie and then Ali are more than just her “friends.” Fey has periodic panic attacks during which she re-lives the incident with Maddie, including one in which Maddie’s death occurs on a patch of red sand. Everyone else on the island insists that no such beach exists on Moriah, but Fey says it’s real and ultimately she and her mom Beth find it. Though Fey is away at the time, Beth spots a shoeprint on the red-sand beach, indicating that someone else knows about it and was there, but by the time Fey finds her way back to the red-sand beach the footprint is gone. Throughout the film writer Lister and director Romay fill it with various nuances, like the pet bird (a parakeet) Fey acquires early on which becomes a symbol, albeit a pretty obvious one, for her isolation and the degree to which she’s trapped on the island. Fey gets into an argument with her dad (one of many) when she brings the bird to the family dinner table in a carrying case and dad, whom we’ve just heard ordering her to remain at the table, now says she must go put the bird back in its cage. In the final confrontation, the bird’s cage is knocked over and the bird escapes – and in the confusion Fey stumbles on her acceptance letter from New York University, the ticket to her own escape which dad hid from her because he didn’t want to let her go.

Also, when Fey and Ali are first getting to know each other, Ali says she came to Moriah from Seattle – exactly the sort of large, cosmopolitan city Fey has wanted to live in – and Ali says she likes Moriah’s isolation because it makes her feel “safe.” Just what it makes her feel safe from is revealed later on when Ali tells Fey she had a stepfather who physically abused both her and her mom. Alas, Richard Lister and Damián Romay had to bring their carefully plotted tale to a resolution sometime, and the way they picked was to have Frank Connolly flip from a neurotically overprotective and controlling father to an out-and-out Lifetime villain. It turns out that Maddie was actually murdered by Curt Dupress, who was paid by Frank Connolly to scare her off the island and break up with Fey. Instead Curt got his own crush on Fey and decided to kill Maddie; he was going to kill Fey, too, but instead he knocked her out with the butt of his gun and raped her, then left her on the island for a couple of days until he came on her and “rescued” her. The “mystery woman” in white whom we’d seen make a couple of appearances at Frank’s office demanding money from him, whom at first both Beth and we assume is someone Frank is having or did have an affair with, and whom Frank later tells Beth is a loan shark come to collect on a debt he owes because of bad business decisions, turns out to be Curt’s mother, blackmailing Frank on the basis of what Curt told her Frank paid him to do. Under the lash of this character transformation, Donny Boaz abandons the tight, highly controlled performance he’s given up to now and goes into full eyeball-rolling scenery-chewing mania as a typical Lifetime psycho villain, though Lister partially redeems himself in the end by having Maddie’s father, Sheriff Joe Wu, be the one who arrests Frank and making full use of the pathos of having the murder victim’s father make the arrest.

Despite the rather cheap ending and the awful title, Hidden Murder Island is actually one of the better recent Lifetime movies, (mostly) carefully plotted and with characters who have depth and whom we truly care about. Even Frank Connolly, the piece’s ultimate villain, seems relatable and understandable: yes, he’s neurotic, overprotective, driven and obsessed with the status of his family on the island (Donny Boaz manages to capture the “look” of unearned power and privilege we see in the faces of Donald Trump, Jr. and his brother Eric when they make public appearances), but we also feel somewhat sorry for him and wish he’d wake up to the implications of how he treats his family members instead of treating them as mere appendages. It’s also a story of escape and its thwarting; it’s full of symbols, including the boat in which Fey tries to flee at the end (until the final scenes we’ve only seen it on a trailer in the Connollys’ front yard) as well as the bird, and as Frank is led away by Sheriff Wu for having arranged the murder of Wu’s daughter we feel a genuine sense of loss even though we’re also happy that Fey is getting away to New York and Beth … well, Beth had previously attempted to get away herself and had had an affair, for which the disgustingly manipulative Frank kept ragging her (more than once in the movie he says to her, “I didn’t cheat on you! You cheated on me!”), and it’s hard not to see her as still a bird in a gilded cage even though her monster of a husband is off to prison and her daughter gets to lead her own life off the island at last.