Dying in Plain Sight (Neshama Entertainment, Polyscope Productions, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Alas, neither of the other two movies – both “premieres” from January 2024 – Lifetime showed last night were anywhere nearly as good as Bad Romance. The first was the “premiere” from January 20, Dying in Plain Sight, about the descent of Morgan Cruz (Raffa Virago) from heavy-set straight-A honor student in high school to drug-addled coma patient in an intensive care unit. The novelty in this one is what starts her descent, which is an increasingly harsh and nasty series of dieting regimens her mother Kim (Nicola Correia-Damude) puts her on. Kim is obsessed with slimming Morgan down to the point where they can share the same clothes, and her already unhealthy obsession with slimming down her pleasingly plump daughter to her own dimensions kicks into overdrive when Morgan, dropping by the office where her dad Nick (Carlos Gonzalez-Vio) works, spots his cell phone open to a text page revealing that Nick has been having extra-relational activities with another woman. Kim immediately gets furious with Nick and orders him to move out of their home at once, and the absence of a father figure sends Kim’s obsession with Morgan’s weight into hyper-drive. In a grim scene in a supermarket, Kim orders Morgan to buy beets and other foods Morgan can’t stand, and warns her off a bottle of soda because it contains artificial sweeteners. When she’s not being consumed (in more ways than one) by her mom’s dietary obsessions, Morgan is coping with being teacher’s pet in a poetry class being taught by Ms. Norris (Yanna McIntosh), a Black woman with close-cropped grey hair and the sort of African-American authority figure Lifetime likes in their movies as the voice of reason trying to talk the white characters out of the stupid things they have to do for Lifetime movies to have plots at all.

Also, Morgan is supposed to be tutoring fellow student Gage Hill (Shawn Seward), who’s tall and bean-thin, dark-haired and baby-faced (let’s face it, I was getting the hots for him and I generally don’t like ‘em that young!). He introduces her to a secret hangout for the kids in Morgan’s high school who are into drugs – though the first time Morgan tries to smoke marijuana she chokes on the smoke and coughs. (Memo to Morgan: the universe is trying to tell you something! That’s the conclusion I reached the two times I tried pot in my teen years and all it did to me was make me nauseous.) Gage and Morgan even make it into Morgan’s bedroom and do the down-’n’-dirty – it’s her first time, which was a bit of a surprise to me given that Morgan had previously been shown using some sort of test strip that revealed it had been 64 days since her last menstruation. I couldn’t think of any other reason besides pregnancy that a girl Morgan’s age would be that late on her period, but eventually there is one: she’s diagnosed with “atypical anorexia,” in which the person suffers all the symptoms of anorexia except the weight loss. Ultimately, while using the treadmill at a gym (one of the many regimens that crazy mom has forced upon her), Morgan faints and collapses completely. When she comes to it’s days later, she’s in a hospital and her family and friends from school, including Erika Sloan (Jenny Steele), an aspiring dancer and choreographer who wanted to star Morgan in an audition video but ended up doing it with someone else, are all there and supportive – though I was hoping their daughter’s crisis would bring mom and dad back together, but it was not to be.

Dying in Plain Sight was directed by Michelle Ouellet, one of Lifetime’s better women directors, from a script by Lydia Genner (a name I’d never seen nor heard of before), and it’s a movie that had genuine potential but flopped badly in the execution. The main problem is Raffa Virago; despite her great name, she’s a singularly dull presence, utterly unable to bring any pathos, depth or real emotion to her character. She’s just another generic Lifetime “pussy in peril,” and the only scene she has that even approaches acting skill is the one in which she confronts Gage over the fact that while she had consciously chosen him as the young man to lose her virginity to, he just treated it as another easy conquest and a one-night stand. It also doesn’t help that Lydia Genner isn’t a good enough writer to make us feel sorry, or feel much of anything at all, for Kim Cruz and her bizarre obsessions that, in the guise of “helping” her daughter, actually ruin her life – or that Nicola Correia-Damude (another great name that deserves a better talent to go with it) plays her as a kind of egomaniacal basket case who cuts off both her dad and her daughter without much in the way of sympathy or commitment. (Generally it’s a bad sign in a Lifetime movie in which a woman responds to her husband’s infidelity by summarily throwing him out of the house; that works out about as well in Lifetime movies as it does in real life, which is never.) Dying in Plain Sight is yet another Lifetime movie that doesn’t do much of anything except fill out two hours of running time: a real pity, because the basic premise could have been genuinely moving with a stronger director, writer and cast (but then any bad movie above the level of, say, Plan Nine from Outer Space could have been helped with a stronger director, writer and cast!).