I Thought My Husband's Wife Was Dead (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2024)

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

The second Lifetime movie I watched on Saturday, August 16, I Thought My Husband’s Wife Was Dead, was disappointing in that it had the potential to be a lot more interesting than I’ll Never Let You Go but blew it on too many spectacular neck-snapping reversals. It’s another movie with African-American leads, though it started out as a novel by Minka Kent called Unmissing – a great title which the filmmakers should have kept. I looked up the Goodreads entry on Unmissing and, though Kent was involved with the production as an executive producer (a catch-all credit which can mean anything from a person who owned the property at one point to an actor, writer, or director grabbing a credit that will mean a bigger slice of the pie financially). The screenwriter, Tamara Gregory, made a few changes to the story – the central couple, called Luca and Merritt Coletto in the novel, become Leo and Layla Winters (Jamall Johnson and Sherilyn Allen), while the mystery woman who arrives out of nowhere and disrupts their lives is changed from Lydia to Vicki Knight (LeToya Luckett). (I suspect the name changes were largely because, while it’s not impossible for Black people to be named “Coletto,” it’s not a typically “Black”-sounding name.) Vicki claims to be Leo’s wife, who was thought to have died five years before (in the novel it was 10 years), but in fact she was held hostage by a mystery man who made her call him “The Master” and regularly abused her sexually, physically, and psychologically until she escaped and was rescued by a group of off-the-grid nomads.

For a while I thought Kent and Gregory were going for the marvelous moral ambiguity Christine Conradt brought to her Lifetime scripts, in which the characters were not clearly delineated heroes and villains but are real people with rationally clashing agendas. Vicki seems to be understandable and even sympathetic in her desire to restart her life after she’s been held captive for five years and ended up homeless (there’s a great scene in which she’s been sleeping on a restroom floor until she has to get up and leave when the building it’s in opens for business in the morning), but she’s also shown as greedy in her constant importuning of Leo for money she claims he owes her. Leo is a boor, and Layla is a spoiled rich bitch who buys $700 pairs of shoes and multiple copies of the white dresses she favors. The only truly sympathetic character in the film is Gina (Angela “Blac Chyna” White), owner of a Black-oriented beauty shop, who when Vikki shows up asking for a job, agrees to put her up in a spare room, let her use the shop address for employment applications, and agrees to let her sweep the shop floor in exchange for these benefits since Gina can’t actually pay her above-board as she has no I.D. Leo and Layla run a fancy restaurant called Chameleon with a rather twitchy executive assistant named Mark (Max Montesi), the only significant white person in the dramatis personae. Mark has obsessive-compulsive disorder and says he met Leo during the search he made for Vikki when she supposedly died. Chameleon is bombing because the décor is stunning but the food sucks – it advertises “healthy comfort food” but the fare is neither – until Vikki talks her way into a job there as “food consultant” and brings in her family’s recipes, which make the restaurant a success. We also learn that Vikki’s mother has been married five times.

Just when we’re starting to think that Mark, who’s making no particular secret of his sexual interest in Vikki, is the mysterious “Master” who held her captive all those years, we learn that [spoiler alert!] it was really Leo Winters who held her in that trailer in the middle of nowhere for five years and took out his sick urges to torture and rape a woman on her. His motive was to grab the $2 million payout on the life insurance policy he took out on her, and Vikki’s hold on him is that if she turns out to be alive, the life-insurance company is naturally going to demand all that money back, which he’s already long since spent on the Chameleon restaurant and Layla’s insane consumerism. About three-quarters of the way through the movie we learn [double spoiler alert!] that Layla was in on it the whole time and was actually Leo’s co-conspirator. Layla had met Leo when Leo was working as a package delivery driver, and he accidentally gave her a high-end package that was intended for someone else. Leo kept giving her high-end goods other people had ordered, and with her ultra-deluxe tastes she loved every minute of it, until Leo’s employers caught on to what was happening and fired him. The two of them then hit on the idea of having Leo marry someone else, take out a huge insurance policy on her, then kill her in a way that would look accidental – only Leo, who was willing to go along with most of Layla’s scheme but drew the line at murder, instead of killing Vikki hid her out in that trailer for five years and did all the nasty things with her that Layla wouldn’t allow in their own relationship.

Layla has also been pregnant throughout the movie with a child they conceived through in vitro fertilization and, after she’s already had two miscarriages, she’s nervous about losing this baby as well – a fact that has made her seem like a more sympathetic character than she deserves. When the baby is finally born, in yet another shock reversal [triple spoiler alert!] Layla stabs Leo to death in their kitchen, apparently to collect on yet another round of $2 million insurance policies she and Leo had taken out on each other. Her plan is to frame Vikki, who’s already bled them dry for $500,000, for the crime, but in the end the police come, arrest Layla, and Vikki as Leo’s legal wife inherits his estate, including his restaurant, and also gets to raise Leo’s and Layla’s daughter. Then a deus ex machina appears in the form of a reality-TV show producer named Mimi (Shaughnessy O’Brien), whom Layla had been lobbying for a show about her and Leo’s lives, only Mimi had told her there wasn’t anything exciting enough to merit one. In the last scene, Mimi sets up a visit between Vikki and Layla, who’s in prison for Leo’s murder. Vikki brings a baby carriage containing the daughter with a hidden camera that films the confrontation in which Vikki boasts that she has taken over Layla’s entire life – her fortune, her daughter, her restaurant, her fashion sense, her social standing – and there’s nothing Layla can do about it. Then, in yet another reversal, Vikki tells Mimi she won’t go through the reality-TV show after all. I Thought My Husband’s Wife Was Dead is an example of a potentially great story dragged down into banality and unwitting silliness by all the reversals, as well as the plot holes (can we really believe Vikki didn’t recognize that the man abusing her in that trailer was her own husband, with whom she’d presumably had a normal sex life?). A situation that could have made for a genuinely challenging and moving film instead gets reversaled to death.