My Husband's Killer Affair (Mhka on Film, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

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

If My Amish Double Life was actually a pretty good suspense story, efficiently directed by Cooper Harrington, the film Lifetime showed as the follow-up, My Husband’s Killer Affair, was mostly a snooze-fest that hardly lived up to the lurid promise of its title. It was credited to a production company called “Mhka on Film,” an incomprehensible name that doesn’t have any other listings on imdb.com, though its distributor was our old friend Reel One Entertainment. It’s actually yet another movie about a nanny having extra-relational activity with the male half of the couple that hire her; her name is Melissa Juneau (Kirsten Comerford) and his name is Will Clark (Matt Wells). The two meet at a bar and she aggressively cruises him; he’s reluctant at first but ultimately the two get it on outdoors in the shadows. Will is married to a woman named Michelle (Kyana Teresa, top-billed), who’s visibly at least part African-American, though he’s white and so is their daughter Lucy (Isabella Astbury). Surely Lifetime’s casting director, Ilona Smyth, could have found a child actress who’d have been more believable as the offspring of a mixed-race couple! We eventually learn that the whole thing has been stage-managed by Will’s brother Carlton (a beautifully honed performance by Ash Catherwood) – we’re told Carlton is the younger brother but Catherwood looks older than Wells – who years before had dated Michelle and apparently never got over her even after she transferred her affections to Will. Both Clarks are the sons of Richard Clark (Peter Nelson), whose vast real-estate holdings in Philadelphia (where this takes place) include a chain of nursing homes. Melissa’s mother Madison (Angela Gei) is a patient at one of the Clarks’ nursing homes, and Carlton is able to blackmail Melissa into doing his bidding by threatening to kill her mom by withholding her crucial medications.

At one point Carlton has a confrontation with dad and kills him by withholding his meds so he dies of a heart attack – during that scene I joked, “Lillian Hellman, you have a lot to answer for.” (I could be committing “first-itis” here, but I think Hellman’s play The Little Foxes, premiered in 1939 and filmed two years later, was the first story to feature someone committing murder by withholding the victim’s life-saving meds.) Thanks to Carlton’s intervention, Melissa got the job as Will’s and Michelle’s nanny the day after she and Will tricked out with each other behind that bar, Carlton also blackmails Melissa into getting him the key to Richard’s house so he can go there and do in his dad. My Husband’s Killer Affair was directed by Roxanne Boisvert from a script by Audrey C. Marie, and it appears to have been a sort of Boisvert family production because both she and Steve Boisvert are listed as producers and Steve is also listed as location manager. Ultimately it turns out Carlton’s motive is to get back Michelle and also to win control of the family business, which dad willed to Will because he thought Will was both more competent professionally and more loyal to his family. Carlton shows Michelle the photos he took of Will and Melissa the night they had their trick-out, and instead of hearing out Will’s explanation Michelle throws him out of their house. (Yet another example of the toxic power of jealousy – or, as Charles would say, the toxic power of cheating.) Melissa correctly guesses that Will has retreated to his dad’s old vacation home – which itself is astonishingly palatial (Charles questioned why anyone, no matter how much money they had, would have as elaborate a home as this when they’d only use it a few months per year) – and the final confrontation takes place there. Carlton announces that he’s going to kill both Melissa and Will and make it look like a murder-suicide, then take Will’s place at the head of the real-estate company and as Michelle’s husband and Lucy’s stepfather.

This is yet another Lifetime movie that gets virtually all its entertainment value from a marvelously controlled performance by the villain, or at least the actor playing him; Ash Catherwood manages to project Carlton’s villainy matter-of-factly, as if it’s the most normal thing in the world, with an air of smarmy self-righteousness that projects his sense of entitlement; inevitably, a lot of the time he reminded me of Donald Trump, especially when projecting the character’s bizarre status envy. For Carlton, as for Trump, it wasn’t enough just to be the son and heir of a rich man; he had to be the center of all attention and able to manipulate the world so he could get literally everyone and everything he ever wanted. Ultimately Michelle becomes the dea ex machina and brings the police along to Will’s and Carlton’s redoubt, and Michelle herself clubs Carlton when he’s about to murder Melissa. There’s a tag scene from six months later in which Will and Michelle are having an outdoor birthday party for their daughter Lucy in the park, and Melissa has since moved on but has sent Lucy a present. My Husband’s Killer Affair could have been a reasonably effective suspense thriller in Lifetime’s best manner, but it goes wrong at almost every turn; writer Marie takes way too long on plot exposition and it’s only about midway through the running time that we get an idea of what Carlton’s plot is and what his motives are. Frankly, it might have come off better if Melissa had been an out-and-out femme fatale determined for her own reasons to wreck Will’s marriage so she could have him for herself! I was amused at the scene in which Will, Melissa and Lucy are settling in to have a movie night on home video. We don’t learn exactly what movie they’re going to watch, but we see the familiar Reel One Entertainment opening logo on their TV screen – making me wonder if writer Marie and director Boisvert were going for a Droste (or Mel Brooks in Spaceballs) effect in which the movie they’d be watching is the one they’re all in.