Daddy's Deadly Secret (CME Summer Productions, Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

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

My husband Charles returned from work in time to watch – or at least be here during – all but the first half-hour of the third Lifetime movie I watched last night (Sunday, July 7), Daddy’s Deadly Secret. This was actually the best of the three, though the phrase is only relative. Directed by Sean Cisterna (wasn’t that where they imprisoned John the Baptist?) from a script by Leo McGuigan – who, judging from his work here, is a believer in my paraphrase of Lewis Carroll’s adage that a person should write at least six impossible things before breakfast – Daddy’s Deadly Secret is a melodrama over-the-top even by Lifetime standards. Dr. Caroline Wallace (Sarah Allen) is a successful psychotherapist and she’s married to Richard Wallace (Steve Byers). He brought with him a nine-year-old child named Abigail Jones (Maya Misaljevic) whom he claims is his from a previous marriage to Ellie Mercer (Andréa Grant). Ellie in turn has remarried and is now the wife of Doug McGill (Steve Belford), whom Richard, some sort of land developer, is trying to help out by giving him some contracting work on a city project. It gets even more complicated than that: Caroline is seeing a particularly demanding and obnoxious patient named Beth (Kendall Wright), who because agoraphobia is one of the conditions Caroline is treating her for, insists that Caroline must come to her place for their sessions. She’s also driven to call Caroline at 9:30 p.m. and other, shall we say, unusual hours for therapy sessions.

The plot thickens (or coagulates) when Abigail doesn’t return home from school and no one either in her immediate circle nor in the school administration has any idea where she is. There’s a red herring involving a gang of four 12-year-old students who call themselves “the Runaway Girls” because they all come from dysfunctional home lives. The Runaway Girls like to hang out in an old, disused convent near the school – which the school has declared off limits to students – but the parents check it out anyway and that gives director Cisterna a chance to do some nicely atmospheric shots of its crumbling walls and ceilings. Daddy’s Deadly Secret is one of those stories in which the various levels of plot peel off like an onion and reveal various hidden truths, partial truths and total non-truths underneath. They trace Abigail’s Social Security number (at nine? I didn’t have one until I was 19!) to a different person altogether, a girl who died in infancy. (That used to be a quite common way of stealing a new identity: find a person who was born around the same time you were but died in infancy, obtain their birth certificate and use that to claim their identity and get documents saying you were that person. It ended when, in order to prevent it, government births-and-deaths record offices started being much more careful about who they gave birth certificates to and imposed regulations that you had to be either the person named or a close relative to obtain theirs.) Then Caroline gets a report from the fertility doctor she and Richard have been seeing that says that Richard cannot have children – he screwed up his sperm count during a three-year bout with opioid addiction, from which his sister Darla, the same woman Caroline has been seeing as a therapy patient named “Beth,” also succumbed and never recovered – which just adds to the suspense and uncertainty as to just who Abigail is and how she came to exist.

Ultimately it turns out that Abigail was the daughter of Doug McGill and Marianne Cunningham (Ferelith Young, whose first name sounds more like a rock formation than a person), who works at Abigail’s school as a crossing guard and who’d been buddy-buddy with Caroline but was determined to steal back her kid and raise her as her own. The police, in the person of Officer Holly Parker (Mercedes Leggett), investigate the case, but during a rather tense interrogation Richard receives word that Abigail has been traced to Marianne’s mountain cabin (not another mountain cabin in a Lifetime movie!) and steals Officer Parker’s car keys to drive out there and rescue Abigail himself. Darla a.k.a. “Beth” showed up at the police station when Richard and Caroline went there to report Abigail missing in the first place, got a good look at Ellie’s husband Doug and yelled out, “I know who you are,” before she was later found murdered. Ultimately it turns out [spoiler alert!] that Doug is really a notorious escaped murderer who killed his previous girlfriend when they were still in high school, then hooked up with Marianne and then Ellie, only he regularly beat up both of them and left wounds on Ellie’s body that Caroline saw but attributed to “accidents.” (A lot of physically abused women tell their friends that they got their bruises and other wounds from “accidents.”) In the end Doug gets killed in self-defense by one of the good characters, Marianne is arrested for kidnapping Abigail but in light of the circumstances, especially once Richard and Caroline vouch for her, she gets a light sentence, and within a year she’s out and the four of them – Richard, Caroline, Marianne and Ellie – are essentially co-parenting Abigail. Daddy’s Deadly Secret was actually pretty good but was done in by the sheer number of improbabilities Leo McGuigan put into his script and the convoluted plotting, though I liked the scenes in which Caroline tries to use therapy-speak to persuade Marianne not to kill her. One wonders if McGuigan’s inspiration was the incident about a decade ago in which a woman held hostage by an ex-con was able to persuade him to release her by quoting excerpts from Rick Warren’s self-help book The Purpose-Driven Life at him!