Husband, Wife and Their Lover (Vast Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Unfortunately, that eluded the makers of the next Lifetime movie my husband Charles and I watched last night (Sunday, April 28): Husband, Wife and Their Lover, a 2022 production from Vast Entertainment (as in, “The gap between this movie and real entertainment is vast”), written by Jason Byers and directed by Lane Shefter Bishop (a woman, by the way). It sounded like it would be some good old kinky Lifetime fun – the imdb.com synopsis read, “When an ad exec's husband suggests a third in their bed to spice up the marriage, she invites her female trainer, who turns out to be bent on revenge” – but it turned out to be just a pretty dreary retread of old Lifetime clichés. The wife at the center of the action, Veronica Ballard-Glen (Nikki Leigh), is no mere “ad exec”: she’s the heir apparent to a combination cereal company and marketing firm that’s been in her family for four generations. It’s currently headed by her father, William Ballard (Sewell Whitney), a thoroughgoing conservative both in business and in personal morality. Her husband is junior-high-school teacher Jordan Glen (Jacob Taylor), who’s predictably feeling “unmanned” because he’s married to a far richer woman than he. At the start of the movie the Glens are being pressured by William to have a child already, and they’ve tentatively planned to devote the next year to conceiving but for now they’re still on birth control and looking for ways to spice up their sex life. There’s a great scene in which their pet dog Cody literally lies between them in bed, at least momentarily stopping them from making whoopee. Jordan tells Veronica that he’d like her to invite another woman into their bedroom for a three-way – he seems to think watching his wife make love to another woman would excite his dormant juices – and the other woman Veronica recruits for this is her personal trainer, Lexi Wolf (Katie Monds).

The three-way duly comes off as planned, though Veronica doesn’t want to do it again and turns Lexi’s offers down flat. Then Lexi keeps coming over and demanding increasingly large sums of money from Veronica – first $5,000, then $50,000 and later up to $500,000 and then $1 million and ultimately $1,500,000. Veronica realizes Lexi is blackmailing her and she’s vulnerable because she’s understandably fearful that if her dad learns she had a three-way with her husband and another woman, he’ll fire her from the company and probably disinherit her. At one point Lexi’s demands on Veronica get so big Veronica can’t possibly pay them without appealing to her dad for help – making up a cock-and-bull story about how she and Jordan want to buy a vacation home in Florida but they’re short $100,000 on the down payment. Dad says no and gives her an insufferably patronizing speech about how he doesn’t want to see her milking his tit the way so many other rich kids’ children do with their parents. Ultimately Lexi kidnaps Veronica’s dog Cody (ya remember Cody?) and threatens to kill the dog if Veronica doesn’t pay up already. While all this is going on, Veronica is also receiving notes – they’re technically anonymous but both she and we know who’s really sending them – containing threats and messages that the sins of the fathers will be visited on their children, and so forth. Ultimately Veronica receives a video on her phone showing both her father William and her husband Jordan being held hostage by Lexi.

What she doesn’t know – though we do because [spoiler alert! – though it’s really not much of a spoiler since we’ve already seen Lifetime use this gimmick in innumerable previous movies] we’ve just seen them smooching in a previous scene – is that Jordan was in on the plot all along. Apparently he got tired of essentially living on an allowance and worked out this plot with Lexi, his old girlfriend from high-school days until he dumped her for Veronica and her millions, to grab some of his wife’s money so he and Lexi could run off together and wouldn’t have to beg from anybody. Only Lexi, whose real name is Sarah Birch and who was a classmate of Veronica’s at the private all-girl Sacred Heart Catholic high school, has more than just scamming Veronica financially on her mind. She wants to humiliate both Veronica and her dad, and it turns out her motive was that her mom worked as a janitor at the Ballard factory and William Ballard was willing to pay her daughter’s tuition at Sacred Heart while her mom was alive. But as soon as Sarah’s mom died, William Ballard cut off her tuition money and left her dependent on the untender mercies of public schools. Sarah a.k.a. Lexi was also upset at Jordan and Veronica for having had their first sexual experience on the grounds of Sacred Heart and therefore violating the school’s sanctity (huh?). While The Replacement Daughter’s writer, Michael Perronne, kept his villainess’s motive front and center throughout the movie and therefore we felt for her even though we hated what she was doing, by contrast Jason Byers dragged it in with just half an hour to go, and he compounded his mistake by having Sarah a.k.a. Lexi stab and kill Jordan, who’s supposedly the love of her life and doesn’t threaten her. Ultimately Veronica manages to kill Sarah a.k.a. Lexi after Lexi tries to discourage her by saying how much she enjoyed their kisses, and Veronica telling her, “You were a lousy kisser.” Just what Veronica and her father are going to go through after having had this bizarre and crazy experience together is a mystery at the end, but then Lifetime has been really big on these open-ended finishes for quite a while and they’re getting annoying.