Murder in a Lighthouse (Mandy Jane Turpin Productions, ManRo Entertainment, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, February 23) my husband Charles and I watched two more Lifetime movies, Murder in the Lighthouse and Don’t Let Him Find You. Charles had joked about the promo for Murder in the Lighthouse because he questioned just how many lighthouses there are left in the U.S. that actually required human operation. Most of the surviving lighthouses are fully automated and need only occasional human intervention to make sure the lights are still burning and the machines are still working. Screenwriter Shawn Riopelle (a name I’ve seen on previous Lifetime movies, though the director’s name, Eric D. Howell, was new to me) actually worked that into the film’s plot; his lighthouse keeper, a middle-aged woman named Adeline (Shelli Manzoline), is hiding at the lighthouse on Lake Superior and living alone there until she rescues a fleeing woman named Lucy (Skye Coyne) who’s washed up on the beach. She makes a few desultory attempts to clean the lighthouse bulbs (which she explains are LED’s) and the windows the light has to shine through, but aside from that the lighthouse is automated and she has almost nothing to do. “Lucy”’s real name is Jessica Vickers, and she’s married to a psychopathic abuser named Colton Vickers (Mark Justice) whom she’s trying to escape by fleeing to Canada. Jessica’s flight plans are complicated by the fact that she can’t go to the police to report Colton because Colton is a police officer himself and his “brothers in blue” will just protect him. Jessica has two men committed to helping her, brothers Anthony (Tyler Noble) and Rory (Brandon Brooks) McCabe, who run a charter fishing boat service. Rory, who’s been in love with Jessica since they were both college students, offers to take her across the border on the lake, but the night they are trying to escape there’s a huge storm on the lake. The storm generates a big wave that capsizes the boat (referencing Gilligan’s Island, Charles joked, “I hope it’s not the Minnow”) and Rory is presumably killed in the shipwreck.

Meanwhile, Colton has already murdered Rory’s brother Anthony after Anthony refused to tell him where Rory and Jessica had gone. So the two most interesting and sympathetic males in the cast don’t make it past the first reel! Jessica is rescued by Adeline and for the first half of the movie Adeline is solicitous and really helpful. Well, this being a Lifetime movie, that isn’t going to last very long, and the situation unravels when Colton shows up at Adeline’s redoubt and Adeline gives Jessica a harpoon gun with instructions to kill Colton with it whenever he shows up with murderous intent. Jessica can’t bring herself to kill Colton when she has the chance, so Adeline does it herself, beating him to death with repeated blows from the handle of her hand-carved cane. Adeline puts Colton’s body in a small boat and sends it out to sea, and once that happens Adeline’s nature does a 180° turn. Instead of a conscientious helpmeet Adeline becomes Jessica’s latest oppressor, insisting that she can’t leave the lighthouse because her knee is still injured from the accident and ultimately literally tying her up. Charles was disappointed that in the second half of Murder in the Lighthouse, it changed from an interesting psychological study of the bond between two women to just another Lifetime movie with a psychopath keeping another woman hostage and being just as oppressive towards her as the psycho husband she was trying to escape. It looks like Jessica will actually be rescued when the African-American sheriff’s deputy, Murray Foster (Rod Kasai), shows up – but Adeline dispatches him by shooting him in the back with her harpoon gun. Adeline also locks Jessica up in an old barn and puts a wooden bar across the entrance door so she can’t escape.

To absolutely no one’s surprise, Adeline explains that years before she escaped from her own abusive husband and therefore she knows exactly what Jessica is going through – though that doesn’t stop her from abusing Jessica much the way Colton did when they were together. (There’s a bit of dialogue in which Jessica explains to Adeline that when she and Colton were a couple, he forced her to quit her job and cut herself off from all her former friends – a typical pattern for personally and sexually abusive and dominating husbands.) It ends with a big confrontation between the two female leads in which Adeline rips the harpoon from Deputy Foster’s back after she’s killed him with it and tries to use it to stab Jessica to death – only They Both Reach for the Harpoon Blade and ultimately Jessica uses it to stab Adeline instead. The more I think about Murder in the Lighthouse, the more I agree with Charles: it was a fascinating tale about women-bonding in the first half that went totally off the rails when Shawn Riopelle decided to turn Adeline from warm and nurturing earth mother into out-and-out psycho. To his credit, he did try to explain it by the trauma of Adeline having lived alone all those years and it having warped her brain to the point where she became insanely possessive of the first other person who’d come her way in decades, but it still was an unsatisfying conclusion to a film that had been quite interesting and even moving in its first half. It’s the sort of Lifetime movie that reminds me of a remark made by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, in which he apprehends the man who’s trying to frame a woman for murder by saying, “He had not the supreme facility of the artist, the gift of knowing when to stop.” All too many Lifetime writers simply haven’t known when to stop!