The Bear Lake Murders (CMW Horizon Productions, Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, January 12), after their fact-based movie Terror Comes Knocking: The Marcela Borges Story, Lifetime showed a much better film even though it was entirely fictional. It was The Bear Lake Murders, set in Portland and Bear Lake, Oregon and dealing with a young woman police detective on the Portland force named Ally Foster (Mercedes de la Zerda). In the opening, set in Portland, Ally has tracked down and captured Caden Hodge (Chris Fassbender), a former police profiler who went off the rails and became a serial killer himself, using his psychological skills and knowledge of the art of profiling to evade capture. Ally has tracked him down to the home of a middle-aged woman who’d already been through an abusive relationship with a man and become a recluse from it. With the aid of her backup officers, she’s able to capture Caden alive, and he’s prosecuted and duly convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for 20 previous murders. But the case doesn’t turn out well for Ally personally; her supervisor orders him to take a paid vacation immediately and use the time to recover. Ally desperately pleads with him to let her continue working, saying that the only way she can sustain her mental health is to stay on the job, but the chief is adamant. So Ally decides to return to the family cabin in Bear Lake, Oregon, where she grew up. As she matured into a young woman, she had two rivals for her affections: Roy Martin (Tom Stevens), who was then a junior officer in Bear Lake’s small police force and is now the sheriff of the town; and Miles (Brandon Giddens), a mystery man who’s just returned from serving in the military and is obviously dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. Eventually she broke up with both of them, moved to Portland and got a job with the Portland Police Department, and she hasn’t looked back until now. Forced by departmental edict to stay in Bear Lake, she’s at once saddened and gratified when people start getting murdered in Bear Lake and, as an expert big-city detective, Roy and his deputy, Brodie Doyle (Blake Williams), welcome her help solving the cases.

The first murder is of Sienna Hartley (Jennifer Procé), an online influencer who does a video blog on various unspoiled rural tourist destinations, with the obvious effect that her posts will attract so many people to them they won’t stay unspoiled very long. We meet Sienna Hartley in the local coffee shop, where she rudely brushes off a waitress for taking too long to serve her coffee. Sienna angrily demands to get it to go instead, and on her way out of the restaurant she bumps into Roy’s sister Rebecca (Magalie). Rebecca accidentally spills Sienna’s coffee, Sienna goes into a big hissy-fit about it, and Rebecca is crushed because previously she’s looked up to Sienna and followed her blog religiously, but now she’s disillusioned and presses the button on her phone to unfollow her. There’s some nice dialogue from writer Ken Miyamoto to the effect that you shouldn’t try to meet the people you admire because they’ll do something to piss you off. Later Sienna is standing in front of the edge of a cliff, rhapsodizing about the glories of the Oregon scenery to whoever’s live-streaming her, and just then a mysterious figure in a hoodie (hoodies have become regulation wear for Lifetime’s killers, at least partly because the hood conceals a person’s gender) pushes her off the cliff while she’s still recording the proceedings on her phone. Unfortunately, the police are unable to find her phone, though they’re convinced – rightly, as it turns out – that she filmed her own murder and whoever killed her will be recognizable on the phone’s video. The next victim is Austin (Jonas Janz), who’s run afoul of the Bear Lake police in general and deputy Brodie Doyle in particular because he, his girlfriend Eve (Tavia Cervi), and some fellow college students have rented a cabin at Bear Lake for the summer and are hosting loud, wild parties there, complete with the obligatory red plastic Dixie cups that have become a symbol of underage drinking in Lifetime movies. Brodie, responding to locals’ complaints, raids the party and demands that Austin shut it down. When Austin refuses, Brodie walks over to the big speaker that’s playing their music and pulls the cord, silencing it at once. (This is a glitch because their sound system is in stereo, and he’d have had to pull the cords to both speakers to get the sound off completely.)

Later Austin goes for a late-night swim in the lake and dares Eve to go with him. Eve declines but Austin goes anyway – whereupon the mysterious hooded figure goes to the box supplying power for the streetlights and rewires it so when Austin finishes his swim and grabs the bar to hoist himself out of the water, he’ll get a lethal dose of electricity. Roy and Brodie find the body and immediately assume it was an accidental drowning until the coroner autopsies the body and declares he was electrocuted. Meanwhile, Caden Hodge, the serial killer Ally caught in the prologue, has escaped when the bus taking him to prison crashed in the mountains off the coast of Bear Lake. He breaks into Ally’s home and confronts her, but Roy rescues her by shooting Caden dead. There are now two suspects in the Bear Lake murders – escaped convict Caden and Miles, who patrols his property with a rifle to drive tourists off his land – but about half an hour before the movie’s end I was starting to suspect Brodie Doyle. I was right, as it turned out; he had a pathological fear of Bear Lake being ruined by tourists and he started knocking off people so word would spread that the lake was too dangerous to visit. Brodie, it turned out, also killed Roy’s and Rebecca’s father, who had proceeded Roy as town sheriff and had threatened to fire Brodie from the force. The big climax occurs when Rebecca Martin is home alone after having finally found – stumbled on, really – Sienna Hartley’s cell phone and got it to work. Roy has sent Brodie over to his place to make sure Rebecca is O.K., but almost as soon as Brodie arrives Rebecca unlocks Sienna’s last video and it shows Brodie killing her. Fortunately, Roy and Ally arrive in the nick of time to save Rebecca.

Directed by Danny J. Boyle – namesake of the Academy Award-winning filmmaker of Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting – quite effectively, The Bear Lake Murders (despite its ho-hum title) is gloriously entertaining. It helps that Roy Martin and Brodie Doyle are both played by drop-dead gorgeous actors – though Tom Stevens and Blake Williams are so similar-looking they could have been cast as brothers, and the only reliable way I had of telling them apart was that Williams had shorter hair. At the end we see Ally Martin back in Portland, handing her resignation to the chief who forced her to take that vacation she didn’t want, and writer Miyamoto keeps her fate after that carefully ambiguous; we assume (or at least I did) that she’s going back to Bear Lake to resume her affair with Roy and become his deputy, now that the position is unexpectedly open, but that’s not spelled out in the movie as it stands. The Bear Lake Murders is actually quite good suspense filmmaking, succeeding where Terror Comes Knocking failed in giving us a coherent plotline and characters we want to see prevail. Even the villain is at least understandable; like Christine Conradt, Ken Miyamoto is savvy enough to realize that a bad guy with some sympathetic characteristics is more frightening than an out-and-out maniac.