I Am Your Biggest Fan (RNR Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

On May 4 Lifetime followed Secrets of the Dean’s Wife with another film that was quite well crafted even though it didn’t break any new, original ground. It was called I Am Your Biggest Fan and was directed by damsel-in-distress actress Haylie Duff from a script by Emily Golden. I Am Your Biggest Fan’s central character is high-school drama teacher Delilah (Meghan Carrasquillo), who 10 years earlier was the child star of an insanely popular TV sitcom called From the Hart. She played Chelsea Hart on the show, and though it went off the air after 10 seasons (during which Delilah presumably grew up as the character did), it’s become such a hit on streaming platforms there’s been a pent-up demand to start producing new episodes again. Only the reboot depends on all the original cast members signing on to repeat their roles, and Delilah flat-out refuses because doing the show was a trauma she’d like to forget. Once we meet her mother Miranda (Denise Gossett), a classical “stage mom” of such ferocity Rose Hovick in Gypsy looks like a model of sensitivity by comparison, we realize why. Gradually Delilah starts getting hate messages from various people who want to start the show back up, including her co-star from way back when, Jerry (Matt Fling), who’s desperate to see the show back on the air because he hasn’t had much steady acting work since it ended. Delilah also has to deal with her students, including one hot young twink who makes totally incompetent hash of Romeo’s great speech opening the Balcony Scene of Romeo and Juliet. They’re constantly sneaking peeks on their phones in class about the latest news about the From the Hart reboot/sequel, Back to the Hart, and the possibility that their drama teacher might be in it. Of course she has no intention of doing so, recalling my belief that the only way a child star can have a sane adulthood is to get as far away from “the business” as possible. (Exhibits A and B: Shirley Temple and Deanna Durbin.)

Because she won’t do the From the Hart reboot, Delilah’s car gets vandalized in the parking lot of her school; slogans denouncing her as “bitch,” “ungrateful,” and other even less kind things are soap-painted on the body, and her tire is stabbed with a knife the perpetrator thoughtfully left in it. Delilah’s one seeming bit of solace in all this is Ellen (Lauren Cole), a rather nerdy-looking woman barista at a local coffeehouse whose slogan in its door is, “Before this, coffee.” When a rock with similar messages to thrones painted on her car is thrown through the window of Delilah’s home and the police advise her to move out for a few days until her security company can fix the place and set up an alarm system, Ellen offers to put Delilah up at her parents’ place, telling Delilah that she’s house-sitting for them while they’re out of town. Only it’s a trap: Ellen turns out to be the titular “biggest fan” of From the Hart and Delilah’s role in it as Chelsea Hart, and like Kathy Bates’s villain in the film of Stephen King’s story Misery (a tale that has the same place in King’s oeuvre as Philomel Cottage does in Agatha Christie’s: just as Philomel Cottage, superbly filmed in 1937 by the British Trafalgar studio as Love From a Stranger, proved that Christie could write a psychological thriller as well or better than her famous whodunits, Misery proved that King could write a well-turned story of human madness without a supernatural component), Ellen has no intention of ever letting Delilah leave her. She’s turned her parents’ home – which she owns outright since her parents “died” (when she says that, we immediately assume she killed them, and later she admits that she did) – into a literal shrine to From the Hart. She dresses Delilah in the sorts of clothes she wore on the show and keeps her chained up so she can’t leave. When Delilah tries to, Ellen is at the ready with a seemingly unending supply of syringes and needles filled with tranquilizers, which she explains she learned how to use when her veterinarian father taught her.

Just when we’re wondering how writer Golden is going to get Delilah out of the clutches of this crazy bitch, in comes Jerry, her former co-star, who traces Delilah to the coffeehouse where Ellen works (and is continuing to work throughout this whole story despite the long commute between her parents’ old place – which is conveniently far enough off the beaten path that it has no cell-phone reception and therefore Delilah can’t call for help – and the coffeehouse). Jerry shows Ellen a photo of Delilah and asks if Ellen recognizes her. Ellen says no, but her boss accosts Jerry outside the shop and says Ellen is lying. Ultimately Jerry traces Ellen and follows her to her mountain redoubt, only to be overcome almost immediately by yet another one of Ellen’s omnipresent hypodermics. Ellen chains up Jerry and threatens to club him to death with a baseball bat because of how Jerry’s character, Cady, treated Chelsea Hart on the show. Fortunately Delilah’s chains are long enough that when Ellen puts down the bat she’s able to grab it, though she threatens to kill Jerry herself. It’s all a ruse, as she swings wide of Jerry and takes out Ellen instead. Then there’s a mild surprise ending in which Delilah realizes that, far from being her knight in shining armor, Jerry was actually the person behind the threatening messages she was receiving on social media, the vandalizing of her car, and the attack on her home. His motive was that, unlike Delilah, he never stopped trying to make it as an actor, but casting directors still “typed” him as the kid on From the Hart and he never got cast in adult roles. Jerry was counting on the From the Hart reboot as a comeback vehicle until Delilah’s refusal to participate put it in jeopardy. It all ends with Delilah returning to her role as a high-school drama teacher and her mother mending fences sufficiently with her to attend her school’s production of Romeo and Juliet. I Am Your Biggest Fan is actually a well-done thriller with relatively few plot holes (though the biggest one comes at the end, when the police arrive at Ellen’s redoubt to rescue Delilah and Jerry and save the day; how, one wonders, did they find it?). Haylie Duff has real potential as a suspense director, and though Lauren Cole and Meghan Carrasquillo are hardly at the talent level of Kathy Bates and James Caan in the equivalent roles in Misery, they acquit themselves well enough in this familiar but still effective tale of obsessive fandom.