A Widow Seduced (Vortex Productions, Super Channel, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Saturday, February 17) I watched two of the weakest Lifetime movies I’ve seen in quite a while, A Widow Seduced and The Beach House Murders. A Widow Seduced was pretty much what you’d guess from the title and it being a Lifetime movie (produced by a Canadian company called “Vortex Entertainment” and what I presume was a premium Canadian streaming service called “Super Channel”). The titular widow who gets seduced is Kellie Gibson (Natalie Brown), who lost her husband to cancer a year before and has since been running their company, Gibson Marketing, but has tired of the grind of being a businesswoman and wants to sell the company and get out. Her seducer is Dan Smith (Gray Powell, who’s easy enough on the eyes and ruggedly handsome but not the GQ model type Lifetime usually casts as its male villains), whom she meets via a dating app she gets on at the urging of her best friend Sasha (Erin Agostino) from a “Bereavement Support Group.” Before the action proper begins, we get another one of those mysterious Lifetime prologues in which we see Dan – or whatever he was calling himself then – torturing a woman to death and then disposing of her body in a woodchipper, which immediately led me to think that the writer, Jessica Landry, had seen Fargo. Needless to say, it’s not until way later in the plot that we learn who this woman was, Lucy Wilson (Jeannette Roxborough) and why Dan (or whoever he is) wanted to kill her. Sasha encourages Kellie to answer Dan’s app post and the two go out for dinner that night. Eventually they end up at Dan’s place and they have sex (and Natalie Brown is just right for the role physically, still attractive but looking like someone who’d been off the dating market for the 20 years of her marriage and hadn’t had sex between her husband’s death – or probably well before that given what cancer does to you in the later stages – and her meet-up with Dan), following which Dan tries to talk Kellie into letting him move in with her.

Dan tells Kellie his own home was destroyed in a fire and he needs a place to stay while it’s being rebuilt. The moment Dan lets Kellie move in, he becomes quite demanding and starts ordering her around, canceling her cell-phone service and opening a joint cell-phone account so he can literally track her movements 24/7. Dan also takes out papers for a joint bank account and demands that Kellie sign them so he’ll have access to her income. Complicating the story is Kellie’s scapegrace brother Jack (Jamie Spilchuck), whom for some reason writer Landry gave the last name “Gibson” even though it’s hard to believe Kellie wouldn’t have used her late husband’s name instead of her original one in managing a business that until his death they co-owned and was really more his baby than hers. Jack previously wrote a software program that became the basis of a huge company, which he sold for a gazillion dollars – which he blew on alcohol and gambling. Now he’s been clean and sober for a year, but he’s still tempted to fall off the wagon and he occasionally takes sips of wine when he thinks nobody (particularly Kellie) is looking. Jack is immediately suspicious of Dan’s intentions towards his sister, and of course his suspicions are right on the money: Dan is really a scam artist out to grab the fortune Kellie is about to make by selling Gibson Marketing. Landry throws us another couple of curveballs in the form of Mona (Sima Sepehri), a woman who keeps getting Kellie’s attention to warn her against Dan – only Dan is able to convince Kellie that she’s just a vengeful ex who doesn’t want him to be happy with a new woman – and a sinister meeting between Mona and two other women who tell each other about Kellie, “We’re just going to have to step up the pressure.”

I wondered whether they were going to turn out to be part of Dan’s plot against Kellie, but in the end they turn out to be the Seventh Cavalry. In addition to everything else, Dan has slowly been poisoning Kellie with toxins in her soup, and she’s about to die when Mona and the two other mystery women kidnap her from her home and force her to drink a jug of noxious liquid. It turns out the liquid is “activated charcoal” (well, that’s what Jessica Landry wrote for them to tell her!) and its purpose is to flush out the poison from her system. It also turns out that Mona is the sister of Lucy Wilson, the woman we saw Dan murder in the prologue, and the two other women are relatives of other rich widows Dan targeted and killed after extracting their fortunes. There’s a typical Lifetime climax in which Kellie confronts Dan, only Dan has captured Kellie’s friend Sasha (ya remember Sasha?) and threatens to kill her unless Kellie makes over the $2 million check for the sale of her business to him. Kellie yields, only [spoiler alert!], in a twist ending that was a lot less surprising than Landry clearly thought it was, Sasha turns out to be Dan’s real-life husband (only they call each other “Chris” and “Emily” instead) and part of his plot. Ultimately the police respond to Kellie’s distress call and arrest Sasha, but Dan gets away – are they setting us up for a potential sequel or did they just want to give us the added frisson of having the principal villain get away and presumably pull this off on another victim somewhere else? The person connected with A Widow Seduced I felt sorriest for was the director, Bill Corcoran, who did the best he could with the nonsense Landry and the five producers (Christopher Giroux, Jesse D. Ikeman, Bill Marks, Evan Ottoni and Justin Rebelo) handed him and actually got in a few genuinely suspenseful sequences, as well as some nice soft-core porn sex between Gray Powell and Natalie Brown, but a silly script and O.K. but hardly great actors did him in.