Secrets of the Surgeon's Wife (Goodflix, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, October 26) my husband Charles and I watched a pretty good Lifetime movie called Secrets of the Surgeon’s Wife, though in this case the “secret” was not that the surgeon’s wife was having an affair, but the surgeon (a dental surgeon, actually) was. The wife is Julia Morgan, nèe Maxwell (Gina Vitori), and her dental-surgeon husband is Peter Morgan (Justin Berti). Julia apparently came from a family with money, and before she married Peter she was a local TV newscaster. Then she and Peter got married and Julia set up a foundation to recruit her husband and other dental surgeons to donate free operations to low-income people. Besides the Morgans, the main person involved in the foundation is Leslie Wells (Chelsea Rose Cook), and the film opens with a meeting with a representative from a potential funder who decides not to donate to the foundation. Julia, Peter, and Leslie decide to go ahead with the celebratory dinner at an ultra-exclusive restaurant they’d booked when they were sure they’d get the donation, and while there Julia has a jealous hissy-fit when Peter seems to be flirting with their waitress. It turns out that Peter is doing a lot more than flirting; he and Leslie are having a full-blown extra-relational affair. One night Peter leaves home at midnight, saying he has an emergency appointment for surgery, but of course Julia sees through this preposterous excuse at once and follows him as he drives to a high-end hotel and stops at the desk. Julia runs into Leslie’s husband Mark (Gabe Pranter) outside the hotel. Mark tries to crash the place and is thrown out because he’s not a guest at the hotel, but he and Julia run into each other and discuss their mutual suspicions about what their spouses are doing. Neither of them want to divorce their cheating spouses, Julia because Peter would likely get all her assets, including those she donated to the foundation; and Mark because Leslie would probably insist on keeping the house they’ve been living in, which had been in Mark’s family for four generations. They conclude that the only way they can get a fair shake in any divorce proceedings is if they can prove that their spouses are being unfaithful. They decide to stalk them and ultimately hire a private detective, Sherman Miles (Paul Rose), to get photographic evidence of the affair between Peter and Leslie. Sherman gets the goods on them when they go to a dental hygiene conference and meet for some hot times between sessions. But Peter and Leslie spot him outside their room, realize he’s been filming them with a camera equipped with a telephoto lens, and decide they need to get to him, grab his video, and drug him before he can meet with Julia and Mark to give them the file. Unfortunately, the injection Peter gives Sherman to incapacitate him works too well and actually kills him. (As Peter muses to Leslie, either he gave him a too-high dose that was lethal or he had some other pre-existing medical condition that made the drug fatal.)

Once they’ve already killed, albeit inadvertently, Peter and Leslie decide to go whole-hog and eliminate their inconvenient spouses as well. Julia and Mark enter Leslie’s home (which Mark has the keys for since it’s his home, too) to play the computer file they extracted on a thumb drive from Sherman’s home when they went there, ostensibly to meet him only he was already dead. Leslie sneaked into the home’s backyard and disabled its wi-fi connection, so Julia and Mark could watch Sherman’s surveillance video of Peter and Leslie fucking but couldn’t upload it and mail it to themselves. Then Peter catches Julia there and gives both her and Mark knockout injections (presumably more carefully calibrating the dose this time), and Peter and Leslie hit on the idea of driving Mark and Julia to an old garbage dump and digging a grave for all three of them, including Sherman’s corpse as well as burying Mark and Julia alive. Only they run out of energy to dig a deep enough grave for three people, so they hit on the idea of putting the unconscious Julia into an abandoned deep freezer and letting her suffocate while they go ahead and bury Mark alive. Julia comes to and realizes what’s happened to her, and because the freezer’s door latches were long gone, Leslie bound the doors shut with yellow plastic ribbons – only Julia figures out a way to cut through the ribbons with a convenient packet of dental floss Peter had previously given her as part of his instructions to take better care of her teeth. (She’d also been shown forgetting to use her night guard, a piece of plastic worn over the teeth while you sleep to make sure you don’t grind them, and this I responded to because for as long as we’ve been together, which is more than 30 years now, my husband Charles has worn night guards, which I jokingly called “tooth condoms.”) Julia escapes and unburies Mark, who in the meantime has become her lover – or at least they had sex together that night in Mark’s and Leslie’s home just before Peter and Leslie came by – and there’s a final confrontation as Mark is determined to murder Peter, Julia tries to dissuade him, Julia steals an SUV from a nonplussed local guy to race to stop him from killing Peter, and ultimately there’s a fight almost to the finish in which the four leads try to kill each other before the police arrive, arrest Peter and Leslie, and Julia and Mark have a bittersweet parting in which they leave the possibility of a future relationship between them open.

Secrets of a Surgeon’s Wife was directed by Yoonhee Ye, a woman born December 12, 1987 in South Korea who’s studied at the American Film Institute. I’d never heard of her before but I had heard of this film’s writer, Shawn Riopelle, whose previous Lifetime credits include Burned by Love (2023), Murder in a Lighthouse (2025), Ice Road Killer (2022), Maid for Revenge (2023), The Evil Twin (2021), and Stalked by a Prince (2022). Riopelle’s previous scripts share some interesting commonalities with this one, including the use of computer files as MacGuffins and the spectacular incompetence of his murderers (in a post on one of his earlier movies I noted the number of people the principal villainess had attempted to kill who were still alive and well at the end). The part of Secrets of the Surgeon’s Wife I liked best was the subtle way Peter and Leslie turn from just illicit lovers into first accidental and then intentional killers. The imdb.com synopsis had made it look like Peter and Leslie deliberately intended to kill Julia and Mark from the get-go, but the actual film is more morally complex than that. Once they inadvertently kill Sherman that sends them totally off the moral rails, to the point where they think the only way out of their predicament is to knock off both their spouses and do it as unobtrusively as possible. Their stratagem for getting away with it is to make it look like Mark and Julia were the cheating couple and they abandoned everything and ran off to be together in an unknown location. Other than that, though, Secrets of the Surgeon’s Wife is a better-than-average but not particularly special Lifetime movie, not quite the slice of delicious neo-noir I was expecting from the online synopsis but well enough staged by director Ye from a capable if not exactly ground-breaking script by Riopelle (whose gender is definitely male, though in some of my previous posts about him I used they/them pronouns because I wasn’t sure).