The Man in the Guesthouse, a.k.a. Man in the Guest House (Maple Island Films, Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Sunday, February 18) my husband Charles and I watched a better-than-average Lifetime movie, The Man in the Guesthouse. At least that’s how the title is spelled in the opening credits, with that abominable mash-up “guesthouse” – one word, as if English were German (I’m still annoyed with the horrible, similar neologism “healthcare”), though imdb.com spelled it Man in the Guest House – “guest house” as two words and without a definite article at the start. The Man in the Guesthouse begins with Brandon and Ashley Burke (Ignacyo Matynia and Kristen Alderson), a 10-year married couple, pushing their budget for a fancy dinner to mark their 10th anniversary. Ashley has proposed they rent out their guest house as an ADU (an “accessory dwelling unit”) to save money, since while he has a good job as a trainer for a chain gym called Forever Fitness, she recently quit her job working for a consulting firm for reasons that don’t become clear until the end of the movie. They remodel and clean up the back cottage – it’s a totally separate building on their property rather than an attached garage – and advertise with a Web site called “House and Home.” Almost immediately they have an applicant, Dan Hansen (Allen Williamson), who identifies himself as a 20-year-old graduate student in business administration at the local college, Astonishingly, they let Dan move in immediately without bothering to check his reference or (as Charles pointed out) even asking to see a student ID to find out if he’s really the student he claims to be.

Mysterious poltergeist-like things start happening around the Burkes, including their hot-water heater pilot light going out and leaving them immediately without hot water (which Charles once again questioned: even if the pilot light is turned off, there will still be a reserve supply of warm water in the heater’s tank until either it’s used up or cools down naturally, which takes time) and their ceiling developing a leak. Dan is, of course, responsible, though it takes the Burkes a long time trying to figure that out. Dan is also dating Ashley’s best friend from college, an Asian-American woman named Shelley Patterson (Anne Patterson), who thinks he’s really nice. But Dan’s presence at the Burkes’ home and his repeated offenses against them, including hosting a wild party into the wee hours and playing ultra-loud music just as the Burkes are trying to get some sleep, turn out to be part of an elaborate revenge plot hatched by Dan’s mother Myra (unlisted on imdb.com), who blames Ashley Burke for the breakup of her marriage to Dan’s dad – who, in a plot twist that like the endings of the two Lifetime movies I’d suffered through the night before, A Widow Seduced and The Beach House Murders, was a lot less surprising than writer Adam Balsam thought it would be – turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Ashley’s former boss, Clay Morris (James Hyde). I’d been suspicious of this character ever since he was introduced and he strongly resembled George Clooney – at least as close to George Clooney as a Lifetime casting director could get on a TV-movie budget.

It turns out that while Brandon Burke was successfully fending off any number of nubile young women at the gym who wanted to engage him in extra-relational activities under the guise of “personal training,” Ashley had drifted into a short-lived sexual affair with Clay. Clay kept trying to recruit her to come back, and there’s a snippet of dialogue between them about him complaining that he hasn’t been able to replace her because he hasn’t yet found someone who can deliver her “unique personal services.” This gets repeated as a flashback towards the end of the movie once she’s tearfully confessed her affair to her husband and we’ve become aware of just what those “unique personal services” were. The film ends with a typical Lifetime confrontation scene between Dan, Myra, Brandon and Ashley in which Dan is supposed to kill the Burkes at his mom’s insistence, only Dan and Ashley Both Reach for the Knife and Dan ends up accidentally stabbing his mother to death. Though The Man in the Guesthouse had some of the same flaws as the previous night’s Lifetime movies – including the surprising physical resemblance between Ignacyo Matynia and Allen Williamson (inverting my usual complaint about movies in which people who we’re told are genetic relatives don’t look like each other; this time they’re supposed to be total strangers but Matinya and Williamson look enough alike they could have been cast as brothers, a problem I had with The Beach House Murders as well: nice Black guy Cj Hammond and nasty Black guy Devante Winfrey also could have been playing brothers) – somehow they didn’t bother me as much this time around. Despite all the plot holes, including that it takes them an hour of running time before they finally decide to check out Dan’s story and learn that he’s not enrolled in college at all, The Man in the Guesthouse was nice and inoffensive, and of course it certainly helped that both male leads were drop-dead gorgeous and director John Murlowski (who also was the cinematographer) gave us plenty of shots of both of them topless (yum!). Certainly Murlowski was a lot better at his jobs than the writer, Adam Balsam, was at his!