Safe Room, a.k.a. Safe House (Astute Films, BondIt Media Capital, Voyage Media, Scatena & Rosner Films, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Unfortunately, the next Lifetime movie, alternately called Safe Room and Safe House, was Lifetime at its worst. Made in 2022 and directed by Boris Kodjoe – whom I remembered as an actor for a charming if not particularly satisfying short-lived NBC-TV series from 2010 called Undercovers. He and co-star Gugu Mbatha-Raw played two CIA agents who met and got married on the job, then quit to run a catering business together, only the CIA kept calling them back for undercover assignments. I remembered Kodjoe as drop-dead gorgeous, often shown off wearing either a body shirt and boxer shorts or absolutely nothing above the waist (yum!). In addition to directing this film he’s also in it, and though we don’t get to see him topless this time out his looks have held up quite well over the last 14 years. Unfortunately, Kodjoe is just another Lifetime director of real promise and potential held hostage by a terminally silly script, this time by one Nneka Gerstle, who asks us to believe in a woman named Lila Jackson (Nicole Ari Parker) whose husband was killed a year before when his self-driving car got its signals mixed up and crashed into an embankment (one more reason to hate Elon Musk). Now she’s a single mother raising her autistic son Ian (Nik Sanchez, whose oddball appearance is perfect for this role but is going to make him difficult to cast as anything else), who’s in his teens and has a worry bracelet with six beads. Mom keeps him calm by having him count to six regularly with the beads on the bracelet. The film quickly turns into a wanna-be Rear Window as Ian trains his camera on a window in the apartment across the street from theirs and films two people, Dominic (Mackenzie Astin) and a woman named Rocco (Drea de Matteo), killing their female neighbor.

Needless to say, the baddies panic once they realize Ian has filmed them in the act of committing a heinous crime, and worried that Ian has somehow not only recorded them but backed it up to “the cloud,” Dominic crashes the Jacksons’ apartment by posing as a repair person. (Lila just happens to be expecting a repair person she’s already called.) Ultimately Dominic holds them hostage demanding that Ian erase all copies of his video, and just as the situation seems to be under control Rocco steps in. She panics that there’s a backup copy somewhere and really throws her weight around, and before long Lila and Ian are hiding in their apartment’s safe room, which seems to have come with the place when they first rented it. They take brief, tentative journeys out of it, including one in which Lila sends Ian to his regular (non-safe) bedroom to open a steel safe that contains his father’s effects because it also has a cell phone in it which Ian could presumably use to call the police and get help. Only the safe has a fingerprint-controlled lock so Ian has to open it personally, and just as he’s in the bedroom he trips over a cord for an illuminated globe (at least that’s why I would think a globe would have an electrical cord) and Dominic and Rocco are alerted that their pigeons are out of the nest. Both Dominic and Rocco are panicked that the mysterious “Boss” they both work for, committing burglaries against high-end apartments in Baltimore (where the story is set), will find out how many loose ends they have left and how many corpses they’ve created. The idea behind the crimes is they wouldn’t kill anybody because they wouldn’t need to, but instead they not only killed the neighbor when she unexpectedly came home and discovered them ransacking her place, they also kill the real handyman when he shows up and a police officer who answers the 911 call Lila tried to make before Dominic and Rocco grabbed her phone and took it away.

Lila tries to activate Ian’s phone but the safe room is insulated so no cell phone signals can come in or out. She tries texting a neighbor, Neil Hargrove (Boris Kodjoe), whom she thinks she can trust, but it turns out [spoiler alert!], in a reversal far less surprising than writer Gerstle obviously thought it was, that Neil is one of the bad guys. He is, in fact, the mysterious “Boss” Dominic and Rocco are working for, and needless to say he’s not happy that they’ve killed so many people so recklessly. The only interesting aspects of Safe Room a.k.a. Safe House are the characters of the two (subsidiary) villains, who seem to have beamed in from a 1940’s film noir. Dominic has some degree of conscience, enough to have rationalized his actions as merely stealing from rich people who can easily afford to lose what he stole from them, while Rocco is a cold-hearted, unscrupulous bitch along the lines of Ann Savage in Detour. As she shoots more and more people who get in her way, we get the sense that we’re watching the birth of a psychopath; Rocco turns before our eyes from a crook who tries to avoid violence to someone who’s discovered she enjoys killing people and wants to do more of it on any pretext imaginable. The film ends with Neil shooting and killing Dominic as he tries to flee – Dominic made the rookie mistake of turning his back to Neil just before Neil turned around and murdered him – before another squad of police officers finally show up, arrest Neil and Rocco, and free the Jacksons. Safe Room a.k.a. Safe House is that frustrating sort of bad movie you sense has the germ of a good movie inside it struggling to escape, but ultimately it fails precisely where Abducted Off the Street: The Carlesha Gaither Story succeeded. The intrigues are stock stuff for Lifetime and there’s not much sense of what makes these people tick and why they do what they do, either for good or for evil. They’re just there.