Who's Stalking My Family? (Pierre David-Tom Berry Films, Storyteller Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Ironically, the next Lifetime movie up on last night’s (Sunday, March 2) program after Abducted in the Everglades was one my husband Charles liked better, even though I didn’t think it was as good. It was called Who’s Stalking My Family? (the imdb.com listing doesn’t have the question mark in the title, but the actual credit does) and it’s about a woman named Ivy Nicole Davis Miller (Kate Watson). There’s an opening scene in which she’s shown giving birth while another woman is in the hospital room watching because she’s already agreed to adopt Ivy’s baby, but this scene was a bit perplexing because Ivy woke up in the middle of it and we’re not sure whether this is a flashback or just a dream. In the main part of the film Ivy is a widow who’s raising her daughter Sadie (Kennedy Martin) as a single parent. Ivy and Sadie have moved to a small town where Sadie is a sophomore in high school who’s attracted the attention of a nice-looking young man named Colton Daniels (Jacob Kaufman). Colton and Sadie are helping each other out with homework despite their two-year age difference. Meanwhile, Ivy has also hosting her sister Lily Kennedy (Muretta Moss), who’s trying to break up with a neurotically abusive husband named Pete (Daniel Stine). Pete is determined to win his wife back and insists that no matter what, the two belong together and he’s determined to get her again whether she wants him or not. Colton is also being raised by a single mother, Angela Daniels (Liz DeCoudres), after the death of his father about six years before. Colton has a memory of overhearing his dad telling his mom he was in love with another woman and was going to leave her for his new girlfriend on the night before he died. Ivy ends up stalked by both Pete and Colton; Pete is stalking her openly, demanding that he be allowed to see Lily, while Colton, who worms the key code to their security system out of Sadie by saying he needs to retrieve a calculus textbook he accidentally left at her place, sneaks into Ivy’s and Sadie’s house to collect samples of Ivy’s hair and a photo of Ivy and Sadie together. Sadie learns he’s stolen the photo when she stumbles on it in Colton’s copy of the play Romeo and Juliet.

Ivy was out on a date with a fellow professor (she’s working as a teacher and has just scored a tenured position) named Leo Franzen (Will A. Holland) when she realized she forgot her jacket and went back to retrieve it, leading to an oddball scene in which Ivy and Colton realize someone else is in the house but keep missing each other (Buster Keaton, call your office!). What’s more, Ivy is being stalked by a mystery figure in a dark hoodie (hoodies have become de rigueur for Lifetime’s villains because they can conceal the wearer’s true gender) that may be Pete, Colton or someone else. For a while I thought that Pete and Colton might be in cahoots in a revenge plot against both Ivy and Lily – I figured Colton might have been adopted and Pete was his real father – but instead the writer, Lori Canavaro, had some other tricks up her sleeve. Colton was adopted, all right, but [spoiler alert!] he’s really Ivy’s son by another man. The other man was the one who had raised Colton and then been killed on their stairs by [double spoiler alert!] his wife Angela Daniels, who was desperate that he not leave and was willing to kill him to make sure he didn’t find happiness with Ivy instead of misery with her. Angela was also responsible for shooting Leo (ya remember Leo?) after his date with Ivy, and the reason for her madness was her neurotic concern that Colton not learn that he was adopted or that Ivy was his biological mother. Colton figured it out from a legal paper related to his case that he found in his researches, and he wanted to steal a sample of Ivy’s hair to run DNA tests on it to prove it. Pete takes himself out by getting drunk and crashing his car into a ravine – apparently we’re supposed to believe that was just an accident, not another of Angela’s machinations – and ultimately Beverly knocks out Angela just as Angela is about to kill Sadie, though she lives long enough to be arrested and ultimately Ivy, Sadie and Colton end up as a rather tense and uncertain but at least not in mortal peril family. I’m not sure why Charles liked Who’s Stalking My Family? so much better than Abducted in the Everglades, since my reaction was the other way around; Abducted had its own set of plot contrivances and coincidences but was at least more straightforward in its plotting. Abducted was also more action-driven, which helped big-time. Like Abduction, Who’s Stalking My Family? was directed by an old Lifetime hand, Jeff Hare, but Canevaro’s script didn’t give him as much to work with as the writing committee on Abduction had done for Damián Romay. But it was still fun to drool over Jacob Kaufman, the nice and very hot young man playing Colton!