Single Black Female 3: The Final Chapter (Swirl Films, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Two nights ago (Saturday, March 22) I watched a Lifetime “race” movie called Single Black Female 3: The Final Chapter (though maybe not; I wouldn’t put it past Lifetime and their partner company on this one, Swirl Films, to concoct a Single Black Female 4) which deals, like the previous two films in the sequence, Single Black Female (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/04/single-black-female-johnson-production.html) and Single Black Female 2: Simone’s Revenge (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/03/single-black-female-2-simones-revenge.html), with the bizarre rivalry between Monica Harris (Raven Goodwin) and her half-sister Simone Hicks (Amber Riley from the cast of Glee). Monica and Simone had different moms but the same dad, a wealthy and well-regarded Black businessman and former Mayor of Houston (the Single Black Female stories alternate between Houston, Texas and Seattle, Washington) who sired Monica with his above-board wife but Simone with a long-term extra-relational partner. Simone’s mom farmed her out to the foster-care system and she was finally adopted, but never got over her bitterness. In previous episodes Simone murdered her and Monica’s dad by slipping poison into his drink, then killed Monica’s boyfriend, Trevor Williams (Kendrick Cross) by posing as Monica, luring him into an S/M sex scene and then strangling him with her whip. Single Black Female 2 ended with Monica being convicted of Trevor’s murder – Simone’s attempt to frame her half-sister having worked – though at the start of Single Black Female 3 Monica is released from prison after serving six months, since DNA evidence conclusively proved that someone else killed Trevor. But that doesn’t stop Trevor’s sister, Seattle Police Department Detective Ebony Williams (Porsha Williams), from insisting that Monica is guilty after all and vowing revenge.

Partly to escape the notoriety she’s still under in Seattle – where she hosted a successful news commentary TV show after graduating from a pop show in Houston called Tea Time – and partly because her old producer in Seattle, Nathan (Garrett Hines), has offered her a revival of Tea Time, she moves back to Houston. She’s accompanied by her best friend, beauty-salon owner Bebe Morgan (K. Michelle), who sets up shop in Houston and serves as Monica’s confidante. Simone was saved from the legal consequences of her actions by a Mother Superior at a Houston convent, Sister Margaret Rodriguez (Stella Doyle), who rescued her from her near-death at the end of Single Black Female 2, took her into the convent, brought her back to health and ultimately admitted her to the convent as “Sister Grace” to symbolize the grace of God that had spared her life. Along the way Simone had a daughter named Joy Chanel Javis (Kennedy Clemmons). By the time of Single Black Female 3 Joy, who like her mom was adopted, is a student at South Texas State College and is dating a nice-looking young man named Devin (Mason Douglas). Mysterious things start happening to Monica, including her car losing its brakes on a mountain road. She survives but is informed that her brake cable was cut, so it was a deliberate assault and murder attempt. Then a mysterious assailant slips poison into Devin’s drink just as Devin has stumbled onto the truth about Simone online, and he dies on Joy’s living-room floor while he and Joy are spending a quiet evening together. The mystery killer also sneaks into Sister Margaret’s bedroom and smothers her with a pillow, leaving all and sundry to wonder just who would kill someone as wonderful and universally beloved as Sister Margaret. Meanwhile, Monica has rejected Nathan’s proposal to revive Tea Time and instead made a counter-offer to host a video podcast about innocent people who’ve served long prison terms because they couldn’t afford good enough attorneys and forensic experts to establish their innocence. Though the first episode is about a Black woman who literally spent years in prison for a crime she didn’t commit but couldn’t prove she didn’t (all too often our justice system in practice is “guilty until proven innocent” even though it’s supposed to work the other way!), and Monica attributes her own release after just six months to the fact that she had a reasonable amount of money and celebrity with which to fight back, of course her own experience haunts the show.

Ultimately Monica confronts Simone, and Simone answers back that she didn’t cut Monica’s brake line, nor was she responsible for the death of Sister Margaret or the disappearance of Devin (whose corpse was hidden after he was killed and hasn’t yet been found). The two half-sisters make an uncertain and guarded bond to find out who did, and ultimately settle on [spoiler alert!] Ebony Williams, who in the meantime has turned up in Houston and flashing her police badge around town to get information about Monica, not letting people get close enough to it to see it’s from another city and she has no jurisdiction in Houston. Ebony goes out to the old mountain cabin once owned by Monica’s and Simone’s dad to track down Joy, only Joy stabs Ebony with a pitchfork and kills her. At first we assume it was in self-defence, but later it turns out [double spoiler alert!] that Joy was the real killer all along, murdering Sister Margaret and Devin and cutting Monica’s brake cord out of an insistence on protecting Simone’s secrets no matter how many killings she had to commit herself in the process. In the end Simone goes to the authorities and confesses her own crimes, and there’s a preposterous scene in prison in which Simone and her daughter Joy run into each other in orange jail garb and actually go for a walk together in the prison yard, happy and bonded at last even though they’re both in penal custody (and thoroughly deserve it). Would any prison in the world house a mother and daughter in the same unit? I don’t think so. Like the two previous episodes, Single Black Female 3: The Final Chapter was written by Tessa Evelyn Scott and Sarah L. Jones (though this time Jones spelled her first name normally instead of using the “Sa’Rah” spelling she was credited with on the first two), though it had a new director, Kessa Ferguson Frasier. This was Frasier’s first feature-length film – until now her previous directorial credits had been for shorts or TV series episodes. Like Shari L. Carpenter, who directed the first two, she’s quite talented with a real flair for suspense and neo-Gothic atmospherics, but she’s hamstrung by the Lifetime conventions and a script that seems to have been concocted by people who, to paraphrase Lewis Carroll, believe in writing at least six impossible things before breakfast.