Playing with Fire (5 Bridges Entertainment, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, March 16) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called Playing with Fire, about a young white straight couple, Loughlin (Brett Geddes) and Natalie (Kirsten Comerford, top-billed), who attract the attentions of an obsessed African-American firefighter named Jack Strathern (Stephen Adekolu). Loughlin is a medical student and Natalie is working her ass off as a night nurse at a hospital emergency room to pay his tuition and other expenses. Though he’s actually rather nice-looking (enough that in another Lifetime movie he might have been cast as the principal villain), Loughlin is befuddled and careless around the house, and Natalie returns home from work so exhausted that often she falls asleep on their living-room couch instead of being able to make it upstairs to their bedroom. Jack enters their lives when Loughlin inadvertently leaves a stove burner on when he leaves for school, and Natalie goes upstairs and takes a long bath in a bathroom mood-lit with at least one candle. (I wonder if screenwriter Caroline Portu had seen the 1976 Barbra Streisand/Kris Kristofferson version of A Star Is Born, with its infamous candle-lit bathtub seduction scene.) Apparently she nods off in the tub, and by the time she awakens the entire hallway is engulfed in flames. Natalie climbs out the window, stands on a ledge and then looks down at the sheer length of the drop down two stories. Fortunately, the fire department arrives in time to rescue her. The team is led by a heavy-set woman named Mandy (Shannon McDonough), whom I read as a Lesbian even though Portu gave us no actual information about her romantic or sexual life, and it includes both Jack and Tony (Deklon Roberts), also tall and Black but a lot more normal mentally.

Loughlin and Natalie accept an invitation from Natalie’s Black friend Alesha (Shanna Armogan) to stay at her place until their own home is rebuilt – and of course Natalie is anxious about how quickly the fire insurance company will pay their claim so they can start rebuilding – but Jack has other ideas. Jack recommends that Natalie and Loughlin move into an apartment in his building that’s rented by a British couple who spend half of each year in London and half in the U.S. (the locale is eventually identified as Chester, Pennsylvania, which really exists and is the oldest city in the state, the place where William Penn first landed to establish his colony). Unbeknownst to the Collinses, Jack not only has the place totally bugged but he’s a whiz at using artificial intelligence. He uses A.I. to simulate Loughlin’s voice and leave messages for people in Loughlin’s voice (I guess Playing with Fire counts as an historical milestone as the first Lifetime movie – or at least the first I’ve seen – to use A.I. as a plot gimmick). One of his messages in Loughlin’s voice is an invitation to Loughlin’s study partner, Alison Sun (Rachel Sellan), to meet him at a hotel bar to get together for romantic purposes. Loughlin and Natalie have already had arguments over Alison’s obvious crush on Loughlin, which he responded to by kissing her one night and then, like a typical American straight guy, felt immediately guilty about it. Loughlin insists that he never sent the message, and tries to prove it by showing Natalie an error message on his phone alerting him that someone else signed onto his device with a different e-mail address. Natalie, of course, doesn’t believe it, especially when she logs onto Loughlin’s phone and sees three pictures (actually taken secretly by Jack) that make Loughlin’s and Alison’s interaction look more physically intimate than it was.

Jack crashes into Natalie’s and Loughlin’s apartment – though, as Charles noted, for some reason Jack needs to pick their lock instead of having the key, even though otherwise he seems able to enter and leave their apartment at will – and later he comes by to present Natalie a so-called “housewarming gift” of a plant Jack, Natalie and Loughlin had seen and admired earlier at a rooftop restaurant. Jack puts out his hand to stroke Natalie’s face, and Natalie matter-of-factly brushes it away, and Loughlin just happens to walk in on them (he’d been on his way to school but he forgot something and went back for it) and has a jealous hissy-fit. Ultimately, like so many Lifetime villains before him, Jack’s obsessive mania gets farther and farther out; when Mandy (ya remember Mandy?) catches Jack at the fire station using his laptop to do Web searches on Natalie, Mandy gets suspicious and threatens to report him to human resources. Jack bides his time until that night, when he sneaks into Mandy’s apartment (how does he know where she lives?) and strangles her to death. The next morning, one of Jack’s white male colleagues wonders where Mandy is, especially since she’d asked him to report early that day, but Mandy just disappears and there’s no account of anybody actually discovering her body and realizing she’s dead. The climax comes when Jack burns down the home of Natalie’s friend Alesha (though fortunately she is out jogging with Natalie and therefore escapes the usual Lifetime fate of The Heroine’s African-American Best Friend Who Catches On to the Villain’s Plot But Gets Killed Before She Can Warn Her) and then confronts Natalie in the apartment Jack arranged for her to have. Jack tries to convince Natalie that Loughlin deliberately set the fire to kill her so he could get together with Alison, but luckily she doesn’t believe him and all comes out right in the end.

One intriguing subplot is Jack’s explanation for why he became a firefighter in the first place; he says his ex-girlfriend Rebecca Montul (whom we never see) died in a house fire, and Jack became determined that no one else would ever die that way. Rebecca actually dated Jack after he joined the fire department, and Jack was so possessive and controlling she got out a restraining order against him. Previous Lifetime movies by other writers have had the ex turn up alive and talk to the current victim about their vengeful, crazy ex, but Caroline Pontu thankfully avoided that gimmick. Instead we see a picture of Rebecca, and she’s dark-haired and doesn’t look that much like Natalie at all even though Jack has told us he got obsessed with Natalie because she was the spitting image of Rebecca. Ultimately Loughlin and Natalie move back into their old house after it’s rebuilt, with Alesha helping them move and announcing that she is engaged to Tony (ya remember Tony?). Playing with Fire is a pretty average Lifetime movie, not either as good or as bad as a few of them have been, and the acting is O.K. but not spectacular; Jack’s character offers opportunities for either dramatic overplaying or dramatic underplaying as a psycho, but Stephen Adekolu doesn’t avail himself of either – though the direction by old Lifetime hand Alexandre Carrière is reasonably capable, exciting and fast-paced enough we don’t linger too long over the plot improbabilities.