My Amish Double Life (Juniper Lane Productions, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Saturday, February 22) I put my husband Charles and I through two Lifetime movies, My Amish Double Life and My Husband’s Killer Affair. I was expecting My Amish Double Life to be sexually titillating garbage like most of Lifetime’s other movies involving the Amish (just how the Amish became so kinky in the minds of Lifetime’s writers and producers that Amish-themed movies have become a significant sub-genre on the channel is a mystery to me) and My Husband’s Killer Affair to be more fun. It was actually the other way around: My Amish Double Life was a quite decent thriller and My Husband’s Killer Affair a rather dreary bore. The central character in My Amish Double Life is Emma Miller (Lexi Minetree), a teenage Amish girl whose life is thrown into turmoil when she finds her father dead, his head split open by a rock as he fell on their farm. I was looking at Lexi Minetree’s imdb.com page to see if I could find out how old she is – both Charles and I were curious about her mid-teens appearance (he guessed her age at 14, I guessed 16, but alas her imdb.com page doesn’t give a birthdate) and my only previous moviemagg blog posts on her are for another Lifetime film, The Paramedic Who Stalked Me, in which she (inevitably) played the stalkee (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/09/the-paramedic-who-stalked-me.html), and a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show called “Fractured” (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/10/law-and-order-special-victims-unit.html), in which she played a young law student who gets raped by a classmate. I’m guessing she’s in her early 20’s and just presents considerably younger than she is, but the actress playing her mother, Mary (Lesa Wilson), though she looks enough like Minetree they are believable as biological relatives, frankly Wilson’s Mary would be more credible as Emma’s older sister than her mother.

Emma is feeling restive with life as an Amish girl, and especially with the strict sexism of the cult that demands its women can only be wives and mothers. She sees a potential way out when her friend Rebecca (Rachel Coopes) offers to take her out of the Amish compound for a night on the nearby town with “the English” (which is what Amish people call non-Amish people). Rebecca tells Emma that she can’t go out in Amish drag, so she comes up with super-scanty dresses for both of them which led me to joke, “Just because she can’t go out dressed as Amish doesn’t mean she has to wear something that makes her look like a hooker.” The two end up at a sleazy nightclub owned by a hot, attractive young man named Heath (Ty Trumbo, who’s sexy enough I’d love to see more from him) who breaks up a rather nasty pass Emma, whose fake ID calls her “Jade” (though since she’s supposedly never left the compound before, we wonder how she got it; most likely Rebecca had it made for her), gets from Tom (unidentified on imdb.com). Heath invites Emma to spend the night with him at his palatial mansion – it turns out he’s independently wealthy from owning a chain of dance clubs, including the one to which Rebecca steered Emma – only he beats a hasty retreat to a business trip in Chicago but tells Emma she’s welcome to spend the night there alone and leave in the morning. Heath has told Emma he’s just recovering from a relationship breakup, but once she’s alone in Heath’s house she sees a shadowy figure enter and seemingly stalk her. She’s knocked out and when she comes to in the morning she finds a dead body in the living room and the scythe her dad used on the Amish farm that is apparently the murder weapon, since it’s got a big bloodstain on the curved edge. Emma beats a hasty retreat to Amishville and Rebecca helps her burn the bloody Amish clothes she wore on her way back home as well as her fake “Jade Miller” ID.

The dead body in Heath’s home turns out to be Heath’s wife, whom he was legally separated from but couldn’t divorce because the terms of their business partnership said that if one of them had extra-relational activity, the other would receive 100 percent ownership of Heath’s and his wife’s lucrative dance-club enterprise. Writers Ken Sanders, John J. Tierney (“original” story) and J. Bryan Dick (screenplay) carefully set up a red-herring suspect in Emma’s Amish former boyfriend Caleb (Nick Clark), who stalks her through much of the running time and looked to me like a very young John Carradine. (At one point Charles joked that Emma was being stalked by Buster Keaton, since Caleb’s hat had a flat brim, though it was made of straw instead of cloth like Keaton’s famous pork-pies.) Through much of the rest of the movie Emma is being surveilled by the official police, who suspect her of the murder of Heath’s wife, while she’s increasingly alienating the leadership of the Amish community by demanding that her dad’s corpse be exhumed and given an autopsy. She’s become more and more convinced that her father was murdered, possibly by the same people who killed Heath’s wife, and of course she’s right. The real killers are [spoiler alert!] Heath and Rebecca, who’d fallen in love (or at least lust) on Rebecca’s previous excursions out of Amish world. They hatched this elaborate plot to murder Heath’s wife and frame Emma for the crime so Heath could keep his fortune instead of having to cede it to her under the terms of their business partnership, and they could presumably get married and live happily ever after. Only Emma is able to escape the frame and in the end the police bust both Heath and Rebecca, while in a rather surprising turn of events Emma decides that the “English” world is not for her and she settles back into the Amish community and accepts Caleb’s proposal. Most of these “Amish” Lifetime movies end up with the protagonist abandoning the cult and adapting to life among “the English,” but this one ends with Emma apparently being scared off of “English” ways by her experience being framed as a murderess by her supposed best friend and her supposed boyfriend.