I'll Never Let You Go (CMW Autumn Productions, Studio TF1 Television, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Saturday, August 16) I watched two consecutive Lifetime movies, I’ll Never Let You Go and the awkwardly titled I Thought My Husband’s Wife Was Dead. I’ll Never Let You Go was directed by Troy Scott from a script by Alex Wright, and it’s basically your standard-issue Lifetime movie of a frustrated middle-aged woman who’s just sent her daughter off to college in Berkeley. This was one of their “race” movies in that all but one of the major characters were Black, and the central character is Emily Westover (Meagan Good, who also executive-produced, whatever that means). Her daughter Sophia (Hana Huggins) has left to attend UC Berkeley, and she’s left behind in Napa, where she works for an art gallery whose viability as a business depends on the success of its next exhibit. The artist who was about to show there suddenly cancels, though Emily’s supervisor at the gallery, Sasha (Marnie Mahannah), lines up a new hotshot photographer from Italy named Carlo Barone (Antonio Cupo). Emily is married to Tom (Thomas Cadrot) and has been for 20 years since they were high-school sweethearts, but Tom is busy writing a novel and has no time for anyone or anything else, including sex with his wife. After Tom rather rudely brushes off her advances (this is one Lifetime movie in which the woman is definitely the sexual aggressor), this leaves Emily a sitting duck for the seduction strategy of Carlo, who shows up and demands dinner and a lot of coddling, which turns into a lot of cuddling, which turns into something else. Sasha is using Emily to persuade Carlo to do press interviews for his upcoming show, and also to get Carlo to make more photographs for it, since he only brought seven and they need 20 for a commercially viable exhibit. There’s also a quite stereotypical Gay man named Byron (Julian Lao) who works at the gallery, and it’s a wonder he doesn’t lust after Carlo – though it’s a quirk of mainstream Hollywood movies that we can be told a character is Gay (though here we don’t even have to be told: Julian Lao’s queeny mannerisms leave us with no doubt) but he can’t be shown actually dating another person of his own sex.

Anyway, Emily has a few hot flings with Carlo, including one in the women’s restroom (where Carlo has sneaked in), until she thinks better of it. Of course, as you might have guessed from the title, Carlo isn’t willing to let Emily go – and she should have been warned by one of the most erotic photos in his collection. She asked who the model was, and Carlo said, “My last gallery owner.” Emily refuses to answer Carlo’s calls, and Carlo gets more insistent, including deliberately scratching the hood of her car when she turns him down. Emily gets into trouble when her daughter Sophia gets in an auto accident after one of her extra-relational sessions with Carlo – which reminded me of an odd sequence of movies my husband Charles and I watched over a decade ago in which for a woman to be able to get laid, someone in her family had to die or at least get seriously ill, and with Emily, shall we say, otherwise occupied her husband Tom had to take charge of their daughter’s care. Meanwhile, Carlo had secretly taken a photo of Emily half-naked in bed after one of their trysts. He promises to delete it from his phone once Emily sees it, but he doesn’t. Instead at the opening of his gallery show he unveils it as his latest creation. Tom and Sophia are there, and Sophia gasps in horror, “Mom?,” as she recognizes the subject. Sasha decides Emily has definitely crossed the line and immediately fires her from the gallery. Carlo sees this as his opening to get her to run away with him and leave her husband for him.

Then we are told he’s done this sort of thing before; in fact, his last girlfriend back in Italy took out a restraining order against him. Carlo’s stalking gets so much of an issue for not only Emily but Tom as well – at first Emily made the mistake of lying to Tom and saying the incriminating photo was digitally faked to put her face on someone else’s body – that ultimately they relocate from Napa to Berkeley, partly so they can be in the same city as their daughter and partly to live down the scandal. Emily has landed a new job in another gallery, but Carlo tracks them down via their social-media presence (this movie is, among other things, a warning to people not to get too revealing on their social-media accounts) and literally steals their pet dog. Emily and Tom report the dognapping to the police, but when the cops learn that the dog isn’t a pedigreed animal but just a mutt they rescued, they lose interest. The finale takes place at Tom’s and Emily’s new home, after a spat caused when Emily finally comes clean to her husband and admits she and Carlo did have an affair. Carlo sneaks in (he’s overheard where Emily keeps her Hide-a-Key) and holds both Tom and Sophia hostage, and threatens to kill either or both of them if Emily doesn’t come over. Emily tries to sneak in and call 911, but in the end Tom is able to cut through his bondage ropes with a kitchen knife and go for the gun he keeps in a safe – only Carlo easily wrests the gun from him. Fortunately, Emily saves the situation by blasting Carlo with his own gun, which he’d dropped, and a year and a half later she and Tom are back together and celebrating the publication of Tom’s book, a novel called The Empty Nest, with Emily as the cover designer. I’ll Never Let You Go is typical Lifetime, though at least we get Meagan Good in soft-core porn scenes with both the men in her life (and when we see her and Tom making love, cinematographer Diego Lozano lights the scene so oddly it looks like his right nipple is a flashlight bulb). If Charles had watched it with me he’d have probably called it a lesson against “cheating,” which it is, but it’s also good clean dirty fun in the best LIfetime manner.