Look Who's Stalking, a.k.a. Haunted by My Stalker (Shadowboxer Films, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Sunday, July 30) I started with a couple of Lifetime movies – now that Lifetime seems to have ended their latest cycle of V. C. Andrews (or Andrew Niederman, since it was he who picked up the “V. C. Andrews” baton after the original author died in 1986) movies and gone back from the Gothic hothouse of the “Andrews” world to more contemporary “pussies in peril” movies. Last night Lifetime showed a recent production called Look Who’s Stalking – a silly title (the original one, Haunted by My Stalker, is more sensible but also more generic) and then a “premiere” called To Kill a Stepfather. Look Who’s Stalking begins with a prologue in which successful woman surgeon Dr. Hope Connors (Alissa Filoramo) is being stalked by Toby Miller (Isaac Stackonis), who’s apparently been making her life miserable for months now. Toby is chasing Dr. Connors up a flight of stairs when he suddenly has a heart attack. Dr. Connors’ first instinct is to help him survive, but she thinks better of it and leaves him on the stairs, presumably to die, because if she’d saved him he’d only be that much more convinced that their destiny was to be together no matter whether she wanted them to be or not. The film then flashes forward “Two Months Later,” and two months later Dr. Connors is having a party to celebrate being rid of Toby. Among the guests are her husband Evan (the not-bad-looking Harley Jay), her daughter Danielle (Kiana Nicole Washington) who’s visibly Black (though how the white Dr. Connors could have had a Black daughter is never explained, we were obviously supposed to assume she was the product of an earlier marriage to an African-American man), Dr. Connors’ old friend Nadine (Robin De Lano) and her new assistant, Mary Le Roux (Juliana Destefano). Evan, an aspiring musician who’s living off his wife’s money even though he’s not happy about doing so, even sings a song to the tune of “Happy Birthday,” only it’s an ode to the joys of Toby’s passing: “Happy Death-Day.”

The only problem for Dr. Connors is that she’s still being stalked by Toby, or his ghost, or someone who’s doing a damned good job of impersonating him. What’s more, her possibly paranormal stalker has an uncanny knack of showing up at precisely the right times to discomfit her. As the film begins Dr. Connors has just left the hospital where she’d been working (the film takes place in Los Angeles) and taken a job at a private surgery practice owned and run by Dr. Fitzgerald (Howard M. Lockie), until she freezes up in the middle of an operation and nearly loses the patient. Then she pulls herself together and finishes with the patient still alive, but her lapse causes Dr. Fitzgerald to fire her. Even before that crisis moment, she’s increasingly driven to the edge of a nervous breakdown by Toby’s apparent reappearances, including one incident when Mary is attacked outside her home by a figure in a black hoodie wearing a red mask (black hoodies have become the favorite attire of Lifetime’s killers because, among other things, they allow the wearer to conceal their true gender so both the victims and the audience can’t be sure whether the assailant was a man or a woman) and beaten unconscious, though she survives. The writers (alas uncredited on imdb.com, and I didn’t get their names off the opening credits if they were listed on the film itself) do a good job of putting Dr. Connors in a Kafka-esque pickle in which she has no idea of who’s doing this to her and what their motives are. Knowing that the one thing she can be sure of is the plot against her is coming from someone who knows her well enough to understand her schedule and show up at precisely the most infuriating and discomfiting moments, she briefly suspects just about everyone in her inner circle: her assistant Mary, her long-time friend Nadine, her husband Evan and her daughter Danielle. The writers give us a brief dialogue exchange between Evan and Danielle about how they need to “stick to the plan,” which briefly suggests that Evan and Danielle are having an affair and conspiring to put Dr. Connors out of the way so they can be together and can enjoy the fortune she’s saved up. Hope reports her suspicions to the police, but the case is assigned to Detective Adler (Jon Briddell), who tells her and Danielle that nothing the mysterious stalker has done is illegal and therefore there’s nothing the police can do unless her stalker actually comes forward and assaults her – which provokes the predictably angry response from Danielle that the cops can do something only if her mom gets attacked.

Two-thirds of the way through the writers and director Doug Campbell (a well-known name among Lifetime buffs and someone who’s quite good at moving these insane stories along fast enough we don’t have time to dwell on their improbabilities until after the movie ends) let us in on what’s really going on: Toby survived the events of the prologue and “Mary Le Roux”’s real name is Mary Miller, Toby’s sister. The two have hatched the whole scheme as part of a revenge plot because Hope broke the Hippocratic oath in the opening scene and refused to intervene to save Toby’s life. Mary is also upset because, though Hope was well aware that Toby was mentally ill and needed psychiatric help, she didn’t intervene and use her contacts in the medical business to recruit him a therapist. As for the mysterious dialogue between Evan and Danielle that set Evan up as a red herring for a couple of acts, that turns out to be Evan having wangled a deal with the owner of a recording studio to get some free time to record a professional-quality demo for both of them, since Danielle has real vocal talent and might be able to land a record contract. Thanks to Hope’s persistence with the authorities, she gets a court order allowing Toby’s grave to be exhumed – and of course his coffin is empty. Later Toby and Mary get into an argument over drugs (Mary has asked him to get her some prescription benzodiazepine so she can use it to poison Hope) and Mary stabs him, thereby this time rendering him really, most sincerely, dead. The climax happens in Mary’s home, where Hope goes to confront her but Mary overpowers her with a baseball bat and ties her up, intending to inject her with benzodiazepine in a solution – only in a clever variation on Maurine Dallas Watkins’ “they both reached for the gun” schtick, Hope has managed to free herself from Mary’s bondage with the scalpel she happened to be carrying, and the two women both reach for the syringe. Mary ultimately gets the potentially fatal dose, though Hope reverses her error in the prologue and administers epinephrine to keep Mary alive so the cops simply arrest her instead of carting away her corpse. Look Who’s Stalking is a nicely done Lifetime thriller, despite that silly title they stuck on it at the last minute, capably directed by Campbell and decently if not spectacularly acted by a professionally competent cast.