Alone in the Dark (The Ninth House, MarVista Entertainment, Tubi, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night (Sunday, March 3) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called Alone in the Dark, which was made in 2022 and was not actually shot under Lifetime’s auspices at all. It was made by The Ninth House and our old friends MarVista Entertainment for a streaming service called Tubi (their promos advertise it as free and also without ads, but I suspect there are a lot of catches to that) and was directed by Brant Daugherty from a script he co-wrote with his wife (of 15 years), Kimberly Daugherty. Both Daughertys are white but most of the protagonists in this tale are Black, including the central character, Bri Collins (Novi Brown), pronounced “Brie” like the cheese. Bri Collins has just been sentenced to a year of home confinement for her role in a fraudulent stock scheme engineered by her (white, and short but highly muscular) husband, MIchael Miller (Christopher Bencomo). Supposedly Bri was just the (stereo)typically naïve housewife, signing whatever hubby Michael told her to and not thinking about it, but not only getting caught but actually serving a longer sentence than he, albeit under house arrest instead of in prison. It’s an intriguing “take” on the 1960’s crime dramas like Wait Until Dark and Lady in a Cage in which a woman is helpless to resist the intruders in her home because she’s disabled; Bri isn’t physically disabled but she’s still trapped inside the house and a sitting duck for whatever mischief (or worse) someone outside decides to unleash upon her.

Mischief duly happens, at first in a poltergeist-like way; while she’s in her living room entertaining her former attorney Sofia Aquino (played by Kimberly Daugherty, the director’s wife and co-author of the script) and the two are helping themselves to major swaths of Michael’s leftover wine collection (it’s eventually established that this is a second house for the couple, a beach house, while Michael’s prime residence is elsewhere and he still lives there), a stranger dressed in the obligatory black hoodie starts rattling the doors. Earlier Bri had disabled the house’s built-in alarm system to admit Sofia, and the place is also equipped with one of those horribly obnoxious security systems by which you’re supposed to be able to tell it through voice commands to do anything domestic, from drawing you a bath to making you coffee. Only, as in every other Lifetime (or Lifetime-adjacent) movie that featured such an app, it goes haywire and starts turning on and off Bri’s lights willy-nilly. Bri is convinced that Michael is behind this even though Michael is in prison – only midway through the movie he’s able to pull some strings with the judge in his case and get an early release. Sofia hands Bri the card for a private detective, Xavier Johnson (Terrell Carter), a very hot-looking and highly muscular Black man who starts getting Bri’s sexual juices up and running again even though she hasn’t had sex with anyone since she and Michael got busted and Bri divorced him. She draws back from an affair with him on the Bodyguard-ish notion that she shouldn’t fuck the hired help, but eventually they do make it into the bedroom.

Only Xavier is on a revenge quest of his own because in a prologue, typical of Lifetime’s story construction in that we see what happens but it takes about half the film’s running time before we learn who the people in it were or how it relates to the main action, his sister Cheyenne Clark (Kris Marshall) was abducted by a hoodie-clad stranger while she was out in the woods jogging. Her body was never found and Xavier is determined to find the person responsible for making her disappear and presumably killing her. Bri reports the attempted break-in to police detective Joe Hall (Malcolm Goodwin), another African-American authority figure, only Hall couldn’t be less interested in investigating it. Xavier and Bri discover that Michael left behind a whole set of hidden cameras in Bri’s house and, with the aid of a technical expert named Dex (a woman, played by Megan Davis), they trace the recordings from the cameras to Michael’s house. They organize a break-in at Michael’s after first figuring out a way to hack Bri’s GPS monitor so it registers her phone’s location, not hers. Unfortunately, Michael is at home that night fucking his latest bimbo – earlier Bri discovered a pair of women’s panties that weren’t hers and realized Michael had used the beach house for extra-relational activities – so Bri and Xavier literally have to hide under the bed as Michael and bimbo fuck each other until they finish and Our Heroes can sneak out again.

They steal the hard drive from Michael’s computer and give it to Dex so she can hack into it, and eventually we learn that Michael, like Baron Gruner in one of the later Sherlock Holmes story, is literally a collector of women. Only instead of a paper trail, he records his conquests by storing the videos of his clandestine sexual encounters in folders on that hard drive. Charles was convinced that Sofia was the ultimate villain and responsible for all the torment that Bri was going through, but in the end Mr. and Mrs. Daugherty identify the villain as [spoiler alert!] Detective Joe Hall, or to use his actual name, Joe Marshall. He’s not a detective; he’s a con artist hired to pose as a cop, and in the last few minutes Bri finally realizes [double spoiler alert!] that Sofia is the bad girl after all. It seems that she and Michael began an affair while Bri’s legal case was still pending. Sofia hired Joe to kill Cheyenne Clark (ya remember Cheyenne Clark?), and now Sofia is determined to murder both Xavier and Bri and make it look like a murder-suicide. Fortunately, however, Bri has figured out a way to use her ankle-monitor bracelet as a recorder and record Sofia’s criminal boasts so the police can hear her brag about her crimes in real time. Xavier kills Sofia with her own gun after she and Bri have had the sort of bitch fight famous from the 1939 film Destry Rides Again, with Marlene Dietrich and Una Merkel launching into physical combat over James Stewart, and the cops arrest their phony-baloney “comrade,” Joe Marshall. Though Alone in the Dark isn’t a great Lifetime movie, it is a surprisingly entertaining and even gripping one, and a welcome return to form after the horrors (in both senses) of Single Black Female 2: Simone’s Revenge – and at least it ends with the good guys winning and the bad guys (and gal) getting their comeuppance!