The Last Thing She Said (CMW Horizon Productions, Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Alas, after the relative excellence of Vanished Out of Sight, Lifetime reverted to formula with their next film, The Last Thing She Said. Set in Seattle – we know that because the first thing we see is a long shot of the Space Needle – it deals with Kate Winslow (Kylee Bush), who’s just graduated from college after having worked her way through school as a waitress and still ending up saddled with a big student-loan debt. It’s not clear just what she was trained to do, but she interviews with a company called Solution Marketing and gets hired by a lecherous supervisor named Eric Clark (Jonathan Hawley Purvis). We know he’s a letch because of the way he stares at her during the interview – it’s obvious he wants to hire her mainly to get in her pants, though he’s wearing a tight brown pullover that shows off his nipples quite nicely and had me in a state of lust over him. On her first day she’s told that she’ll be working nights and weekends to get out a major project the company is working on, and she’s in her office after the usual hours when suddenly the lights go out. It turns out that the janitorial crew, a heavy-set middle-aged woman named Maria Stan (Jill Teed) and her 20-ish son Stephan (Lucas Penner) who’s “mentally challenged,” “learning-disabled” or whatever the current P.C. euphemism for “slow” or the “R-word,” turned out the lights to save electricity and didn’t realize anyone was still working there. Maria offers to take Kate to a late supper at a restaurant she knows, and the next day (or a few days later; Don Woodman’s script wasn’t clear which) Stephan gives Kate a bouquet of red roses. Alas, Eric catches him offering Stephan the bouquet and summarily fires Stephan, saying it’s totally inappropriate for a mere janitor to be cruising one of his office workers. The moment he says that, we hate him for his classism as well as his untoward attentions towards Kate.

Ultimately he and Kate go back to Kate’s place for what she thinks is just another late work session while he’s there with seduction on his mind – only they’re interrupted by Kate’s ex, Matt Stone (Tyler Cody), who’s there to pick up a box of his things to take to his new place. The next day Kate is overpowered by an unseen assailant as she gets into her car to go home, though that happens half an hour into the film at the first commercial break and we don’t get to see who it is. The next time we see Kate, she’s been bound hand and foot and handcuffed and chained to a bed, with a gag in her mouth. Nobody in the office, including Eric and her Black best friend Hayley T. (Shastina Kumar) – we never learn her last name but we get the initial from an e-mail inbox we see – has any idea where she is. Ultimately the police detectives on the case, Josh Wilson (Curtis Lovell) and Ann Davis (Alana Hawley Purvis), arrest Eric Clark for kidnapping and murdering Kate based on forged evidence against him the Stans have planted in his trash can and his bed (since Maria and Stephan were also hired to clean Eric’s home, and therefore Maria had his keys). The police are taken in by Maria’s innocent-victim act, even when Matt shows up at their home suspicious that they’re holding Kate against her will and finds a charm bracelet she always wore. Maria clubs him to death, reports it to the police, and is able to convince Josh – who’s already been established as a friend of hers off-duty – that she acted in self-defense and he shouldn’t investigate further. The police do a good-faith search of the Stans’ home and find a small room in the basement where Stephan has a drum set – though we’ve never actually seen him practice on it; his chief avocation is highly violent video games, which he plays while muttering aloud about how many people he’s killing. It turns out the room where they’re holding Kate was a separate basement under the main one that was originally built as a fallout shelter (ya remember fallout shelters?), and once the cops get hold of the original plans for the house they realize what happened to Kate and where she is.

It was a nice touch on writer Woodman’s part to have Ann Davis, the cop who isn’t a personal friend of Maria Stan, be the one who finally catches on to what she and her son are up to. But overall The Last Thing She Said (a title that suggests the plot is going to revolve around Kate’s last words, which it doesn’t) is yet another Lifetime movie about two crazy kidnappers who think that even though they’re holding their victim against her will, sooner or later they will “break” her and she’ll accept and even love her new-found “family.” There’s also a wrinkle that Maria is determined that Kate will have Stephan’s baby, and when Kate declares that she’d rather die that have sex with Stephan; Maria says that’s not going to be a problem. Having previously worked as a nurse – which gave her a thorough knowledge of incapacitating drugs she’s used to keep Kate under control – Maria knows how to do artificial insemination and proposes to use that to force Kate to conceive Stephan’s child. It all ends with Stephan giving his mom one of her own drugs after she threatens to kill Kate once Kate is no longer of use to them, and then the cops arrive in the nick of time, arrest both of them, and set Eric (ya remember Eric?) free. One thing that really irked me about this movie was its politics, which seemed all too fitting on the eve of President Donald Trump 2.0; of course in this Right-wing age the proletarians are going to be the bad guys and the hot young executive who regards himself as entitled to any even remotely attractive woman in his employ is going to be portrayed as the innocent victim! The Last Thing She said was directed by Danny J. Boyle – the other Danny Boyle from the one who’s directed Academy Award-winning movies like Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting – and as usual this Boyle is a technically efficient and competent but unimaginative director who does the best he can with a pretty rotten and sorry script.