Woman with the Red Lipstick (Black Watch Entertainment, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

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

The third and last new movie on Lifetime’s January 21 schedule was that night’s “premiere,” Woman with the Red Lipstick, which like Dying in Plain Sight promised a good deal more in the promos than the actual film delivered. It deals with a young woman, Lucy Carver (Rebecca Liddiard), who’s a reporter for the (fictitious) Chicago Chronicle and who’s in a relationship with a young man named Roy Kirkpatrick (Marshall Williams, who’s good-looking enough that according to the usual iconography of Lifetime movies makes us suspect him from the get-go). One night Roy suggests to Lucy that to spice up their relationship she should dress up a certain way and pretend to be another woman, Maggie. He will pretend to be “James” and he will accost her in a bar exactly at 8 p.m. She is to wear a blonde wig and a neon-bright red lipstick, and the two of them will pretend to be meeting for the first time and ultimately repair to a nearby hotel room for hot ‘n’ heavy sex. Lucy goes through with the date, only the next day while she’s in the newspaper’s office she sees a report about disappearance and suspected abduction of Magnolia “Maggie” Maines (Danika Frederick), daughter of tough, no-nonsense Chicago political operative Zelda Maines (Marina Stephenson Kerr, who’s as good playing a high-end mother figure as she was as a low-end one in Bad Romance). Lucy asks her editor, Odette Heller (Rebecca Gibson), for permission to cover the Magnolia Maines case, and while Odette is initially reluctant to give Lucy the story after Lucy acknowledges that her interest in the story is due to Roy’s having given her the role-playing assignment the night before, ultimately she yields.

Lucy is so certain that Roy had something to do with Maggie’s disappearance she sic’s the police, in the person of her long-time friend and source Detective Oliver Webb (Paul Essiembre), on Roy – which provokes Roy to break up with her. Writer Isobel Bradbury throws us a red herring in the person of Dan Brooksbank (Justin Stadnyk), Maggie’s 1-percent ex-boyfriend, and Lucy turns him to the cops as well. Later, however, Lucy gets a meeting with Zelda – Zelda has sworn not to talk about Maggie’s case to anyone, especially not a reporter on the record, but Lucy wears her down through sheer persistence and her friendship with the doorman at Zelda’s building. Zelda shares with Lucy information from Maggie’s college diaries that said she was stalked by a crazy, obsessed student using the initials “J. D.,” and at first she and Lucy both think that’s Brooksbank since he uses his middle name and his actual first name is Jerome. Later, however, Zelda says it’s really a reference to the legendary actor James Dean, who used to stalk Maggie wearing a red jacket like the one Dean wore in Rebel Without a Cause. (Zelda can’t remember the film’s title, though since Dean only made three films as a star before his death it’s not that hard to figure it out.) Lucy puts two and two together and recalls that when Roy showed up for their role-playing date, he was wearing a red jacket (though a college jacket instead of the windbreaker Dean actually wore in Rebel). This convinces her that her – and our – suspicions about Roy were right after all: Roy not only stalked Maggie in college but kidnapped her in the present and is holding her somewhere in his house.

When Lucy confronts him, Roy admits that he never got over Maggie and hoped he’d be able to work through his obsession with her by having Lucy pretend to be Maggie on their date, but it didn’t work and that night he snatched the real one. Lucy ultimately finds Maggie and the result is one of Lifetime’s typically preposterous final confrontations, in which the two women try to escape, Roy chases them through his home and ultimately one of them knocks him against a wall at the foot of a staircase. We see him bleeding from a wound on his forehead and then the next time we see him he’s in a body bag, so that apparently glancing blow was enough to do him in. Sadly, writer Bradbury and director Tyson Caron (I’m presuming that’s a man, though there’s nothing on Lifetime’s page about them to indicate their gender) don’t follow through on the hints of a burgeoning romantic interest between Lucy and Dan Brooksbank, though at least Lucy’s journalistic career gets the predictable boost from her being the one to solve the Maggie Maines disappearance. Even more so than Dying in Plain Sight, Woman with the Red Lipstick is a mediocre movie with a very good movie trapped inside and struggling to get out; as it is, Rebecca Liddiard is too relentlessly perky to make us believe in her as the dedicated, energetic reporter the script tells us she is, and likewise Marshall Williams is too much the pretty-boy yuppie (I know that’s a dated term, but he’s a dated character) to make us accept either his surface charm or his deep-rooted romantic obsession. Add to that indifferent direction by Tyson Caron and a script by Isobel Bradbury that fails to make much of the potentially interesting situation – a man who never got over his college crush and the lengths he will go in the present to fulfill his dreams of her – and you’ve got a disappointing movie that checks the boxes on the Lifetime formula but does awfully little with them.