Maid for Revenge (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, November 5) at 6 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched two Lifetime movies in a row, including a better-than-average one called Maid for Revenge about a youngish woman, Annie Wilkerson (Kathryn Kohut), a widow with an eight-year-old son named Tate (Lincoln MacNeil, who looks more like about 12, but that’s a common enough failing in movies generally). She served 2 ½ years in prison for allegedly driving under the influence in the car crash that killed her late husband, during which time Tate was in the custody of his paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Hale (Barbara Gordon). Annie shows up to work as a maid for a couple she’s never met – they’ve instructed her to let herself in and go to work immediately. They’ve also left her a pitcher of water with a note reading, “Help Yourself” – only the water is spiked with something or other. She collapses beside the swimming pool, and when she comes to hours later there’s a dead woman in the pool. Instead of doing the sensible thing and calling the police – though later we learn that because of her prison record she’s convinced the police would never believe her and in fact would assume that she killed the woman herself – Annie grabs the cordless phone in the kitchen and calls the contact number she’s been given for the place’s owners. (She doesn’t use her own phone because she doesn’t have one; she’s lost it.) Only there’s no answer, so, desperate to get away, Annie tries to steal a truck belonging to neighbor Billy (Matt Wells), only Billy catches her. Eventually he agrees to drive her home, but when she arrives she finds Tate and her babysitter Katy (Zara Matthews) aren’t there.

Ultimately she gets in touch with Katy and finds that the sitter took Tate to his grandmother’s when Annie didn’t show up when expected. Annie talks to her family lawyer, who urges her to turn herself in, but she refuses. Eventually she realizes that she’s being framed, and with Billy’s help she traces the frame to two crooks, Maynard Barnes (Terry WJ Ryan) and baby-faced Marcus (Tim Myles). Only they’re being paid by a mysterious big boss who turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Annie’s former mother-in-law, Elizabeth Hale, who wants Annie sent back to prison or executed so she can have permanent custody of Tate and raise him in the material affluence she thinks he deserves. Writers Justin B. James and Shawn Riopelle (the former a new name to me – though according to the imdb.com page for the film he’s credited as “Dustin Hames” – but the latter a “regular” on films from the Johnson Production Group, which this is) actually reveal Elizabeth Hale as the villainess about an hour and 10 minutes into the movie – which is a bad thing in terms of the suspense and keeping us guessing, but a good thing in that it allows Barbara Gordon to turn in a no-holds-barred bad-girl performance from then on, and she seizes on the opportunity. James and Riopelle do a good job of throwing us red herrings – at one point Charles was convinced that the babysitter was in on the plot, while for much of the movie I thought Billy would turn out to be the (or at least a) villain, not only because Matt Wells is drop-dead gorgeous (usually a sure sign of evil for a male in a Lifetime movie) but also because there are hints that he’s a drug abuser. The first time Annie comes to see him at his place he hurriedly scoops up a metal hash pipe and hides it in a styrofoam fast-food container, and later we see him take a whole lot of ibuprofen (seemingly much more than he would need as a legitimate painkiller) and wash it down with a can of cheap beer.

Annie is ambushed by Maynard and Marcus but escapes them absurdly easily when they won’t cross through a shallow creek and get their legs wet, which she’s been willing to do. Grandma Elizabeth gets Billy to drive her to a deserted mountain cabin (not another deserted mountain cabin as the site of a Lifetime movie’s climax!) because Maynard and Marcus are holding Tate as hostage (ya remember Tate?) and demanding $200,000 in $20 bills. Charles questioned not only whether there’d be enough room in Elizabeth’s handbag for that much money but also how she was able to get that much cash together in the middle of the night, though later she explains that it came from a safe where she stashed it as a sort of rainy-day fund. Elizabeth knocks out Billy with a tire iron and goes into the cabin to pay the ransom, which Maynard and Marcus insist on counting – director Alexandre Carrière periodically cuts away to shots of Tate under a blanket with his feet twitching to let us know he’s still alive – but Billy recovers, calls the cops and ultimately they arrest Elizabeth while Billy offers to take both Annie and Tate on a vacation that’s pretty obviously going to turn into a honeymoon. I give Maid for Revenge credit for not always going in the most obvious directions stipulated by Lifetime in its formulae; it’s not much of a movie in terms of overall quality, but it’s an above-average Lifetime thriller and, despite some whopping improbabilities, the plot actually makes sense.