Boy in the Walls (Lighthouse Pictures, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Saturday, August 5) I had wanted to watch a Lifetime “premiere” movie called Boy in the Walls, and it turned out to be surprisingly good, a well-done reworking of familiar Lifetime themes coupled with a few new twists. The central characters are Alysa Jones Jensen (Ryan Michelle Bathe), a Black woman approaching middle age who’s hooked up with and married a white widower, Chris Jensen (Luke Camilleri), on a dating app; Chris himself and Chris’s two kids, daughter Maya (Cassandra Sawtell) and son Theo (Mikkal Karim Fidler). Alysa is so desperate for her and Chris to have a child of their own she’s on fertility treatments (we see at least two shots of her giving herself hormone injections), and naturally Chris’s two existing children aren’t happy with a new stepmother, and an African-American one at that. (Writers Katrina Onstad and David Weaver are too good – or too politically correct – to make Alysa’s race an explicit issue in the plot, but it’s hard to avoid it or to discount it altogether.) The Jensens have just moved from New York City to an old farmhouse in Lanbury, Connecticut whose previous owner, a 42-year-old woman with a son she had raised as a single parent, had died mysteriously. Though Chris and Alysa remain pretty oblivious to it – and in Chris’s case, at least, that’s no surprise because his job requires him to be out of town a lot – the kids notice that there’s some sort of presence in the house that shouldn’t be there. Among other things, Theo’s water bottles and a container of ice cream mysteriously disappear, things get moved around and Pearl, an old doll from the childhood of Maya’s and Theo’s mother Rachel which Maya has carefully preserved as a relic of her late mom, first ends up in a trash can and later is vandalized.

Briefly we’re led to believe that the titular “boy in the walls” is Maya’s new boyfriend Ethan (Jace Fleming), whom she met at school and took to because he was darkly handsome and had a bit of the sinister about him. But eventually we learn that the boy is Joe (Jonathan Whitesell), son of the house’s previous owner, who it’s hinted murdered his mom out of jealousy, rage or whatever (sort of like Norman Bates killing his mother in the backstory to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho). For some reason, Joe has developed a sick crush on Alysa and is determined to possess her, including overpowering her, tying her up and giving her a date-rape drug so he can have his wicked way with her and she’ll be powerless to resist. Only she’s able to overcome the effects of the drug well enough to loosen the ropes Joe used to tie her (one gets the impression Joe isn’t all that great at bondage) and grab the aluminum baseball bat Joe had used to knock her out to knock him out as he was about to kill Maya. (Earlier Joe had given us some nonsensical psychobabble to the effect that for some reason he regarded Maya as his principal obstacle to him getting Alysa and therefore he needed to knock her off.) Maya is able to get to a phone and call the police, who duly show up and arrest Joe.

Like a number of other recent Lifetime movies, Boy in the Walls (whose title is itself a “spoiler”) is better done than the synopsis would make it seem; director Constance Zimmer (any relation to Hans?) has a real flair for suspense and Gothic horror in modern dress; though she’s obviously not in the same league, I was sometimes comparing her to Hitchcock and Lewton in her indirection, her not stating the obvious. It’s not until two-thirds of the way through the movie that we actually see Jonathan Whitesell as Joe full-figure; until then we only get shadowy glimpses and lots of point-of-view shots of Joe spying on the various Jensens through holes in the walls of the old house. There’s also a nice touch in the scene in which Alysa, out for a jog in the countryside, spots the empty ice-cream container and Theo’s mysteriously disappeared water bottles – only by the time Chris returns from his latest out-of-town business trip the refuse is gone; obviously Joe cleaned them up in the meantime. In the end Joe is taken into custody, the Jensens are reunited and the kids’ qualms about having a Black stepmother when they hadn’t quite done grieving over the loss of their original mom seem to have been eased by the trauma of the situation with Joe, but even this happily-ever-after ending seems less artificial and tacked-on than it has in other Lifetime movies. And I liked the the fact that we actually got an explanation as to why a white husband and a Black wife have white kids; we weren’t expected to assume there’d been a previous relationship the way we were in the recent Lifetime film Look Who’s Stalking, in which African-American Danielle Connors (Kiana Nicole Washington) just turned up as the daughter of white Dr. Hope Connors (Alissa Filoramo) without any explanation at all!