Don't Let Him Find You (Storyteller Studios, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, aired February 23, 2025)

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

After Murder in the Lighthouse on February 23 my husband Charles and I watched the next film up on Lifetime, Don’t Let Him Find You. I was really looking forward to this one because Christine Conradt was the director, and in previous Lifetime scripts she’s created characters with genuine moral ambiguity instead of falling neatly into “hero” or “villain” pigeonholes. Alas, Conradt directed but she didn’t write the script this time around, and the person who did, Stephen Romano, totally lacked her gift for creating genuinely complex human characters. It’s about a mystery woman named Alex McDowell (Brianna Foster), who’s living in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband of 15 years, Robert (Philip Boyd), and their 10-year-old daughter, Charlie (Audrey Lynn-Marie). I’m not sure just where Mrs. McDowell got her penchant for giving both herself and her daughter such masculine names – and it is a name she gave herself because, as we eventually learn, “Alex McDowell” is a false identity. Her real name is Rose Forster and she’s on the run from a murder charge in Austin, Texas. The woman Rose is supposed to have killed is her sister Ashley (Ella Frazee), and her motive was that Ashley’s husband Justin (John Castle) was actually in love with Rose. Though Rose couldn’t have been less interested in him “that way,” Justin continued to pursue her with the support of Rose’s and Ashley’s mother, Marnie (Sallie Glaner). Alex’s carefully constructed false identity unravels quickly when she and Robert come on a 60-something woman who’s having a heart attack in a public park. Though supposedly Alex’s own experience with lifesaving techniques was as a high-school lifeguard, she takes command of the situation and uses all the appropriate medical terminology as she talks to the 911 operator her husband has called. (Obviously she worked at a hospital as a trained nurse during the interim before her reinvention.)

Unfortunately, the event is witnessed and filmed by local TV reporter Jane Chance (Courtney Grace). Alex angrily refuses Chance’s request to do an on-the-spot interview but the story gets aired anyway, and it attracts the attention of bottom-feeder true-crime blogger Stuart Cooper Jones (Byron Frank). Jones sees an opportunity for blackmail in the story; he’s able to locate Alex’s phone number and buttonhole her in the park, give her his business card, and demand that she see him. Once they meet he tells her he wants $50,000 in blackmail money to spike his own story, and when she protests that she doesn’t have that kind of money he says he can pay her “in kind” by having sex with him. Then a mysterious stranger wearing the ubiquitous gender-concealing black hoodie that’s become the obligatory wear for Lifetime killers stabs Stuart Cooper Jones and strangles Jane Chance in her car, thus dispatching Alex’s most immediate threats. But the mystery man in the black hoodie is out after Robert – who’s attacked outside their home while he’s taking out the trash, though Robert successfully fights him off but ends up with a concussion that puts him in the hospital. Alex tries to hide out by registering at a seedy no-tell motel, and fortunately Robert is able to trace her when she makes a $2,000 withdrawal at a nearby ATM (in $100 bills – all the ATM’s I’ve used personally only give out $20 bills and I don’t think any real-world ATM’s allow you to withdraw that much money in a single transaction). The climax is split between the hospital, where Alex has gone to visit Robert and she has Charlie in tow – only Alex sees Hoodie Man and flees, while Charlie leaves her father’s hospital room to go see what’s taking her mother so long to get them the promised snacks (she said she was going to go to a vending machine but didn’t have the cash, which struck me as a plot hole since most modern vending machines take credit or debit cards, and Charles tells me that a few modern vending machines only accept electronic payments). This gives Hoodie Man a chance to kidnap her and take her to a safe house where grandma Marnie is waiting for her. Marnie’s and Justin’s (he’s Hoodie Man, and he’s not bad looking; in fact, if you judge solely on physical attractiveness it looks like Alex née Rose traded down big-time in rejecting him for Robert) mad plan is to eliminate Robert and force Rose to stay with them, marry Justin and accept him as Charlie’s “new dad.”

Fortunately Robert is able to track them down, and after the sort of baroque climax beloved of Lifetime’s writers, ultimately Robert, Alex and Charlie are reunited, Marnie and Justin are arrested, and Alex is able to resolve the outstanding Texas warrant against her with a plea deal by which she gets three years’ probation and 200 hours of community service, which she’s allowed to do in Atlanta. (Robert questions why his wife is willing to plead guilty when we’ve seen the flashback sequence of how Ashley really died – Ashley, in a jealous rage, went after Rose with a knife, They Both Reached for the Knife, and Rose stabbed Ashley in self-defense – but it’s an economical way of resolving her criminal liability without her having to go to trial or risk prison time.) The more I think about Don’t Let Him Find You, the more I wish Christine Conradt had written as well as directed it; she might have been able to make Justin and Marnie genuinely pathetic (in both senses) people instead of just stock-figure villains. I give her credit for getting a beautiful etched-in-acid performance out of Sallie Glaner as Marnie – though she only appears in one scene towards the end, she makes an indelible impression (and I fantasized that she could be the “other” Marnie, played as a young woman by ‘Tippi’ Hedren – Melanie Griffith’s mother and Dakota Johnson’s grandmother – in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1964 Marnie, an underrated work in the Hitchcock canon – grown older) – and for an overall air of suspense and doom. I also liked the implied social comment that the media regard just about anybody as fair game for exaltation and then abuse whether they’ve chosen a public life or not, and then hide behind the First Amendment whenever anybody questions them or their tactics. But despite the way Alex McDowell, t/n Rose Forster, is “outed” when she actually did something positive (her secret could have stayed hidden for years if she hadn’t responded to the pleas of a dying woman and instead had just let her die) and this caused her carefully constructed and concealed backstory to unravel almost immediately, for the most part Don’t Let Him Find You is a pretty average Lifetime movie, good for several frissons but not much in the way of actual terror or thrills.