The Killer I Picked Up (Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Sunday, October 13) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called The Killer I Picked Up, about a 30-something African-American woman named Angela Turner (Patrice Goodman) whose husband died two years back and left her a teenage daughter, Brianna (Eden Cupid). She’s attempting to raise Brianna as a single parent and save enough money to send her to college, and in order to achieve enough money to pay her bills she takes a second job – a “side hustle,” as she calls it (the film’s working title was Side Hustle Nightmare) – as a ride-share driver. As she does this Angela meets the usual assorted group of people, including a nice-seeming Black guy named Aaron (David D’Lancy Wilson) and a white weirdo named John (Carlos Gonzalez-Vio) who shows up in her car wearing a wig and fake beard that make him look like a taller Charles Manson. John declares himself Angela’s God-destined soulmate and grabs her arm when she won’t take his telephone number, and suddenly Aaron comes along and rescues Angela from John’s unwelcome attentions. I thought Aaron would be Angela’s Black savior from John’s stalking, and Charles guessed Aaron would be the titular killer. As it turned out, we were both right; Aaron had actually hired John to harass Angela and come on to her so Aaron could come along and look like a hero saving her from John. But John was so instantly smitten with Angela that he decided he wanted her for himself, and demanded more money from Aaron as his price for leaving Angela alone.

Aaron lives in a large house with his sister Whitney (Raven Dauda) and Whitney’s son Jason (Kolton Stewart), who predictably falls for Brianna and has no idea that Aaron is actually a serial killer. It turns out towards the end that Aaron started by killing his wife and daughter by overpowering them and locking them in the trunk of his car until they expired, then put on the grieving-widower act for his sister and hired a number of private detectives (or at least saying he was doing so) to find them. What’s more, he began targeting 30-something Black women raising teenage daughters as single mothers and killing them, in an apparent attempt to reproduce the family dynamics behind his original crime. Angela seems genuinely taken with Aaron (though the two stop short of actually having sex with each other), until her blond white friend and co-worker D. J. (Joanne Boland) suddenly and mysteriously disappears. Given that the leads in this movie are Black, it had to be a white woman in the role of The Heroine’s Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Secret but Is Killed Before She Can Warn Her, but that duly happens and she keeps receiving D. J.’s texts (Aaron stole D. J.’s phone) but hears nothing back from her vocally. This worries her because Angela and D. J. have always made it a point to call each other and talk, even on days when they show each other together on their job five days a week. The people who actually rescue Angela eventually are her daughter Brianna and her boyfriend Jason, even though Jason’s uncle is the person Angela is in danger from.

Angela gets a call from Aaron to meet her at a particularly out-of-the-way location. Angela agrees to go despite her misgivings because she sees it as an opportunity to break up their relationship at long last. Aaron, of course, sees it as an opportunity to get her to a remote spot with uncertain cell-phone service so he can do her in. Brianna and Jason break into Aaron’s room – he has a combination lock but she’s a good enough lock-picker she’s able to get it open regardless – and discover a file containing photos of all Aaron’s previous victims in manila envelopes on which he’s thoughtfully written their names with marking pens. They’re luckily able to deduce the remote location where Aaron has taken Angela – and Angela has been running away from Aaron, at which she’s surprisingly effective even though she’s a slightly built woman and he’s a beefy, athletic-looking man. Ultimately Angela is able to sneak up behind Aaron with a tree branch and knock him out cold long enough for Brianna’s 911 call to go through and the police to arrest him at the end. I’d have rather seen Aaron either die in a shoot-out with the cops or escape for the sake of a sequel. Director Annie Bradley and writer Tyler Richardson (Annie has 30 previous credits on imdb.com but this is the first one for Tyler, and there’s no certain indication as to whether they’re male or female) come up with some striking bits, and the ending is actually quite good suspense filmmaking, but the story is as full of holes as a Swiss cheese and after the high quality of last week’s Lifetime premiere, The Girl Who Wasn’t Dead, this is a return to Lifetime’s usual slovenly form.