Wife Stalker (Swirl Films, GroupM Motion Entertainment, Röhm-Feifer Entertainment, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Saturday, March 29) I watched what promised to be a pretty standard Lifetime movie called Wife Stalker, produced by a plethora of companies affiliated with the Johnson Production Group, directed by Elisabeth Röhm (whose experience playing Assistant District Attorney Serena Southerlyn on Law and Order has obviously stood her in good stead as a thriller director for Lifetime) from a script by Barbara Marshall based on a novel called The Wife Stalker (note the article) by sisters Lynne and Valerie Constantine. The Constantines sign their books with the joint pseudonym “Liv Constantine,” mashing up their real first names, and they apparently specialize in these sorts of dark family tales. For the first hour and 55 minutes Wife Stalker seemed like a pretty generic Lifetime movie (my husband Charles got home from work early and watched all but the first half-hour of it with me). Hot-shot successful divorce attorney Leo Drake (Trai Byers, a hot hunk of Black man-meat I was looking forward to seeing in a soft-core porn scene – and, blessedly, I was not disappointed!) is apparently happily married to Joanna (Keshia Knight Pulliam) and is living in a large home in Atlanta, Georgia with him and two children, Evie (Alayna Bernard) and Aaron (A. J. Bernard). Only their relationship is suddenly broken up when, as part of a case he’s working on, Leo goes to see a yoga instructor and meditation counselor named Piper Reynaud (Grace Byers, Trai Byers’s real-life wife). He wants her to testify as a character witness for a client who’s fighting his ex in court to maintain custody of their kids, but even before the first commercial break, they’re seeing each other on a dinner date, she’s heavily cruising him, he’s giving in, and ultimately they end up having sex. Leo is so obsessed with Piper that he immediately decides he wants out of his relationship with Joanna so he can marry Piper. Naturally Joanna is upset, so she starts stalking Piper, having looked up her last name and found it’s also the name of a legendary fox-like creature in medieval France who specialized in breaking up other people’s marriages.

Joanna gets her first clue when she sees a man named Brent (Eric Tiede, a white guy whom I thought was even sexier than Trai Byers; director Röhm gave us lots of nice mid-shots of him showing off his ample and impressive basket, though alas he appears in just that one scene). Brent addresses Piper as if he knows her but calls her by another name, “Pamela Dunn,” and it’s Joanna’s (and our) first clue that “Piper” is not who she seems. Ultimately Joanna traces Pamela a.k.a. “Piper” across the country to San Diego; Annapolis, Maryland; and Washington, D.C. It turns out her original name was Pamela Rayfield and her first husband was Eric Sherwood, only they and Eric’s child from a previous marriage went on a hiking trip, the kid died, Eric ended up in a coma and Pamela survived unscathed. Joanna hears this story from Eric’s mother Trisha (Deja Dee) and gets to see Eric in a coma in the guest house Trisha built for him. When Joanna asks the comatose Eric to squeeze her hand if Pamela disabled him and killed his kid, he does so violently and Trisha has to separate them. Pamela later made her way to San Diego, joined the local yacht club, bought a sailboat and got married again to local politician Matthew Dunn, only that abruptly ended when the boat “accidentally” capsized in San Diego Bay and both Matthew and his daughter Mia drowned. Joanna hears that part of the story from Matthew’s ex, Mia’s mother. Our suspicions are aroused when Joanna acts so neurotically overprotective of Evie and Aaron that ultimately a police officer accosts them in a park and warns Joanna not to be physically abusive to Aaron. They’re also aroused when Joanna finds a gun box belonging to her mother (regrettably unidentified on imdb.com even though she’s the only truly sympathetic character in the story), and later mom finds the box emptied of its gun and the Taser she also carried. Joanna’s fears ramp up into overdrive when “Piper” offers to take Leo and the kids sailing during the upcoming three-day weekend, and she desperately pleads with Leo not to let that happen because of what Piper a.k.a. Pamela did the last time she took her husband and his kids out sailing.

Where I thought this was heading was towards a climax at sea, in which Joanna would rent a power boat, use it to track down Piper, Leo and the kids, and shoot Piper with the gun before Piper could kill Leo and the kids. Instead the final confrontation takes place on land, and Joanna’s gunshot wounds but does not kill Piper. Then there’s a commercial break, and with just five minutes of running time left to go [big-time spoiler alert!], we’re suddenly thrown a curveball. The next scene after the commercial break shows Joanna in a federal penitentiary (the intertitle doesn’t say which one, and Charles questioned this because even if Joanna had killed somebody, since murder is generally not a federal crime she’d most likely have been sent to state prison instead), and we learn that Joanna and Leo were never married; that Joanna was just a woman Leo hired as either a paralegal, a nanny, or both; and Joanna became so obsessed with the kids that she drowned their actual mother in a bathtub and moved herself into Leo’s house, posing as Leo’s wife and the children’s mother. I looked up the book The Wife Stalker on goodreads.com mainly to find out which writers to blame for that preposterous ending – the Constantines or Barbara Marshall – and it turned out that was how the book ended, too. There were quite a few changes between the book and movie: the book takes place in Westport, Connecticut; the male lead’s name is Leo Drakos; one of the kids is still named Evie but her sibling is Stelli; Piper joins the local yacht club as soon as she arrives in Westport (don’t most yacht clubs require you to have a sponsor who’s already a member?); and, judging from the heavily lipsticked model on the cover, the protagonists of the novel are white instead of Black. (I was amused that Leo Drake is presented as a graduate of Howard University, the historically Black college whose alumni included Thurgood Marshall and Kamala Harris.) But enough people on goodreads complained about the ending that it was clear Barbara Marshall had simply carried it over from the novel and it was the Constantines who were the culprits.