by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Lifetime’s next “premiere,” Off the Rails, was also dated 2017 but seems to have been made at
least with the hope of a theatrical release — or at least a release in
countries whose TV stations aren’t governed by the abominably prissy
regulations of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC). There are
quite a few instances here in which the characters say “bull-,” and the obvious
second syllable of the word is abruptly cut off. Like Forgotten Evil, the second “premiere” story from Lifetime last
week, Off the Rails is an amnesia
story; college professor Nicole Halliwell Barrow (played by an actress with the
delightfully improbable name “Hannah Barefoot”) is on a train that suddenly
derails, and when she comes to she has lost all memory of great chunks of her
life. She’s been living for three years with her boyfriend Mark Barrow (Thomas
Beaudoin) and suddenly discovers that she married him, something she hadn’t
remembered doing. She also finds out that she has active accounts on Facebook,
Twitter and Instagram, even though before the accident she not only had no
social-media presence but actively resisted the idea. Her office assistant,
Zara (Vanessa Kai), who fills the avuncular voice-of-reason role typical in
Lifetime movies even though she’s Nicole’s own age and Asian instead of Black,
tells her that not only did Nicole never go on social media but she argued with
Zara when Zara tried to get her
to open Facebook and Twitter pages.
What’s more, Nicole’s Facebook, Twitter and
Instagram pages indicate that she’s sexually available and into kinky scenarios
— which Nicole discovers when a man in a ski mask (after Fatal
Defense it was a jolt to see another guy with a ski mask in this movie!) crashes into her office, attempts to rape
her, and then explains that he was only responding to a post she put up on a
Facebook group they’re both in (one specifically aimed at married people
seeking extramarital partners) asking him to dress up as an intruder and enact
a mock “rape” on her. When he realizes he’s been snookered, the guy, Walter
Gasker (David Anthony Buglione), apologizes to Nicole and says the rape bit
wasn’t his idea — he just wanted
to get laid. Eventually we realize that someone else must have put up all those
social-media pages in Nicole’s name, and Nicole discovers that in the last few
months before her accident she and Mark had agreed to take a “break” from their
relationship — and apparently she’d been the busy little bee, having all sorts
of casual encounters as well as one semi-serious affair with art photographer
Luc Cormier (Andreas Damm). Much of what Nicole does remember about her recent past comes back to her in
therapy sessions led by Dr. Teres (Andrea Cline), but there’s one sequence in
which she’s shown talking behind Nicole’s back to her husband Mark and we begin
to wonder whether they’re in a conspiracy together to drive her crazy, Gaslight-style. Eventually the fake social-media pages are
traced back to Jillian Borsic (Campbell Dunsmore), who was Luc’s girlfriend
until he threw her over for Nicole. Borsic had the expertise to fake computer
pages since she worked in the IT department of the college where Nicole
teaches, and after quitting her job and disappearing Borsic contacts Nicole and
offers to meet her — only Nicole has to take a train to do it, and given what
happened to her the last time she
went on a train anywhere Nicole is understandably reluctant. But she screws up
her courage and this time the
train stays on the tracks and gets Nicole to where she’s supposed to go — which
turns out to be a stop in the middle of nowhere at which Borsic has Nicole get
off, the two have a confrontation outside the train as it’s stopped, and then
Borsic shoots herself and Nicole gets back on the train and returns home.
Nicole also discovers a building contractor whom Mark hired to expand their
deck, and who tells her that Mark was unusually hands-on about watching the
work being done and dictating how it was supposed to go. Mark’s explanation for
why he’d undertake a major remodeling project at such a stressful time in their
relationship is that he expected her to get a promotion at work which would
require them to do more entertaining at home — but at this point both Nicole
and the audience begin to suspect that Mark really killed Luc, who’s
disappeared, and used the new construction to bury his body under the new deck,
Rear Window-style. At the end it turns out
— more or less, because writer Tracy Andreen isn’t exactly big on plot clarity
— that Mark conspired with the therapist not only to knock off Luc, for whom
Nicole was planning to leave him when she had the accident, but to bury the
body — and the two plan to bury Nicole alive and put her under the deck once she finds out the truth.
Evidently either Andreen decided to write a non-linear script or Luc survived
after all, because after Mark and the corrupt therapist are arrested and Nicole
is rescued from premature entombment, our last shot of her is she’s once more
on a train, going to meet Luc — or was that what she was doing when she had the accident
originally? We don’t know, and Andreen isn’t about to tell us — neither
Andreen’s name nor their imdb.com page lets us know whether she’s a man or a
woman, but whichever gender s/he belongs to s/he obviously thinks s/he’s Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind author
Charlie Kaufman. Alas, Andreen is as far removed from Kaufman’s talent level as
his/her director, David Jackson, is from Alfred Hitchcock’s, whom he’s
obviously ineptly trying to emulate. Unlike Fatal Defense, which was just silly, Off the Rails had the potential to be a good movie with more
sensitive (and coherent) writing and tighter direction; as it is, it’s
watchable more for Hannah Barefoot’s capably hard-bitten performance in the
lead and the hot bods of Thomas Beaudoin and Andreas Damm as the two men in
Nicole’s life than for anything in Andreen’s script or Jackson’s direction.
