Trapped in the Spotlight (Candour Pictures, Vortex Media, Black Tree Pictures, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Saturday, February 15) I watched a Lifetime movie I was attracted to by the sheer bizarre stupidity of the concept. It was called Trapped in the Spotlight and its plot premise dealt with a two-woman soul duo called Luscious, who broke up abruptly when one of the members, Lupita (Melyssa Ford), got tired of the alcohol abuse and overall diva-esque behavior of her partner Neveah (Monique Coleman) and walked out in the middle of a gig. When that happened the group was three songs away from finishing their album that was supposed to be their ultimate statement as artists, Phoenix. Flash-forward 15 years and Neveah is living alone in a New York City loft she’s about to be evicted from for non-payment of rent. She’s still trying to break back into the music business and she tells her landlady she’s about to have a meeting with a major-label representative and she’ll be able to pay the rent tomorrow from the advance she’s sure she’s going to get – only Quinten (Scott Anthony Cavalheiro), the rather supercilious white executive she’s there to see, won’t hold still long enough to hear her and flatly tells her that her reputation in the industry is not such that anyone’s interested in promoting her comeback. Neveah has a diva-esque hissy-fit that, this being 2025, gets filmed by various people on their smartphones and uploaded to social media. Later, just as Neveah is about to commit suicide by hurling herself out of the open window at her loft, she gets a call back from the white executive. But it’s a trap; he’s been forced at gunpoint to make the call so the crazy Black ex-fan stalker Izaak (Emmanuel Kabongo), who turns out to be the son of the group’s original manager, promoter and record producer, Lenny (Glen Michael Grant), can kidnap her. Izaak has nurtured a dream all these years to get Lupita and Neveah back together and record the last three songs to complete Phoenix (it occurred to me that this would be something like a crazed fan kidnapping Brian Wilson and Mike Love and holding them hostage together until they finished Smile).

To do this he’s set up a fully equipped recording studio inside a warehouse building his father owns, and he kidnaps Lupita as well. Lupita meanwhile had definitively retired from the music business as a condition of being allowed to marry her boyfriend, Marcel (Romaine Waite), and though it’s not clear how either makes their living, they’ve had a daughter, Simone (Eden Cupid), who’s now 10. Though the cubicle inside Lenny’s warehouse looks like a fully equipped recording studio, Izaak is making the actual recordings on a little red hand-held computer device. Lupita, who’s also been kidnapped, and Neveah start recording despite the handicaps imposed by Izaak, including handcuffing them together – he explains that they still have two free arms between them with which they can play keyboards – and chaining them to the floor between takes. (One wonders how they eat or use the bathroom; previous Lifetime villains have at least provided their captives with slop buckets, but not Izaak.) Izaak insists that Neveah have a glass of wine with him to celebrate the impending completion of the album, and though Neveah at first protests, saying she’s been sober for 10 years, ultimately she joins him. When Marcel and Lenny trace the location of Izaak’s home studio, Izaak holds them both captive and, in the film’s most shocking scene, stabs his dad in the chest with a kitchen knife. Ultimately Lupita and Neveah hit on an idea; knowing that Izaak is streaming the songs to the outside world and they’re actually getting a fair number of hits, they decide to sneak a message onto one of the tracks. They work out the Morse code for “S.O.S.” and include it into the rhythm of one of the songs, and also insert a backward-masked lyric revealing their location.

The clues are worked out by Lupita’s daughter Simone and her babysitter Roxanne (Sammi Jo Higgins), a college student and the only other white character in the film besides Quinten. Unfortunately, Izaak finds the torn piece of paper on which Lupita and Neveah wrote the lyric giving away their location, and it’s a race against time whether the police can find them before Izaak kills everybody – which he’s planning to do by pouring gasoline around the recording cubicle and setting it on fire. Ultimately the cops arrive in time to rescue everybody Izaak has been holding captive, while he’s taken into custody (or did he die in the fire? I’m not sure) and the little red recorder on which he was taking down Luscious’s last songs burns in the fire. (That seemed a bit of a “cheat” to me because the files for the songs would exist in the servers of the streaming services to which Izaak uploaded them.) Trapped in the Spotlight was directed by Nicole G. Leier – who actually does a pretty good job within the limits of the absurd script – but there are no fewer than four credited writers: Derick Ackerley, Jag Gill, Alberto Halfeld, and René Rodriguez-Lopez. Aside from offering more proof of my general field theory of cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers, those people should be deeply ashamed of themselves!