A Neighbor's Vendetta (Headlong Entertainment, Benattar/Thomas Productions, Vendetta Films, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Sunday, August 4) my husband Charles and I watched a three-film marathon on Lifetime beginning with one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen them do. It was called A Neighbor’s Vendetta and it dealt with Sonja Richards (Chelsea Gilligan), her estranged husband Jason Turcott (Stephen Good, who for once in a Lifetime movie is drop-dead gorgeous without being a villain!), and Mia Wilson (Sydney Cole Alexander). Mia and her late husband Robert (Austen Jaye) are African-American, Jason is white and Sonja is racially ambiguous. The backstory is that Sonja turned off of having sex with Jason when they lost their daughter Eve either to a miscarriage or a stillbirth (writer/director Rainy Kerwin doesn’t make it clear which) at a time when they’d already prepared a bedroom for her, put her name in block letters on their wall and knitted a pair of yellow booties for her, which Sonja presented to Jason as her way of telling him she was pregnant. Now they’ve separated, though they have enough residual affection for each other that they’ve both declined to sign the divorce papers, and on the advice of her therapist (whom we hear a lot of on Sonja’s cell phone but we never see), Sonja has begun dating again. Unfortunately, the man she’s dating is Robert Wilson, head of a large company doing something or other (Kerwin never tells us what), who hired Sonja to design a remodel of their offices and never bothered to tell her he was married. It’s also not clear from Kerwin’s script whether Sonja and Robert actually had a physical relationship or just did phone sex, but he met his demise when as part of a phone-sex scene he tied a belt around his neck and died from auto-erotic asphyxiation. Mia is determined to run her late husband’s company herself, though how she can do that is unclear when it seems her main preoccupation is to get revenge against Sonja for having been responsible for her husband’s death.

Mia leases a mountain cabin next to the one Sonja and Jason have repaired to thinking that getting away from the big, bad city will help them rekindle their joint sex life, and, calling herself “Claire,” she seizes on Jason and tries to seduce him. After a long, dreary running time – Charles joked that virtually the whole movie was people arguing with each other – the show lurches to a final confrontation in which Mia confronts both Sonja and Jason, shoots Jason – wounding him seriously enough that it’s touch and go whether he’s going to survive – then drops the gun. Sonja grabs it and tries to kill Mia, but the gun has run out of bullets, and in the end the incident proves to be an elaborate frame in which Mia has contrived to make it look like Sonja shot Jason in a jealous rage over his affair with Mia. Sonja points out that Mia’s fingerprints will be on the gun, and Mia smiles and says, “No, my fingerprints won’t be on the gun – yours will.” Then she pulls off the skin-tight gloves she was wearing when she shot Jason. The cops actually arrest Sonja while Mia gets away in a car with Louisiana license plates which she rented in Shreveport as part of an elaborate alibi she faked – she was ostensibly at a business convention there. The film ends with Sonja in prison for Jason’s murder – she was denied power of attorney because she was officially his killer and the state went ahead and pulled the plug on him – though Kerwin drops a hint that Mia just might meet her comeuppance after all when the someone at the rental-car company notes that she returned the car in which she fled with 452 miles on it, way out of line for something that was supposedly just a local rental. I really don’t like mystery stories that end with the villain getting away with it – as Raymond Chandler put it, it’s part of the logic of the form that the criminal has to be punished in some way; if he or she isn’t, “it leaves a sense of irritation” – and I liked this ending even less since Kerwin tried to have it both ways. There are a lot of ways in which a Lifetime movie can go wrong, and A Neighbor’s Vendetta seemed to hit virtually all of them!