by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was called The
Wrong Daughter, though it was shot under
the working title Love Me or Else
(which actually would have been better — less clinical, though also less
obvious to the Lifetime audience), and it started in a group home where “bad
girl” Samantha Brown (Sydney Sweeney in one of those appealingly perky
young-psycho performances that abound on Lifetime movies) is rooming with “good
girl” Danica Tyrell (Sierra Pond). The group home’s manager, Ms. Hanson (April
Bowlby, a name I remember from previous Lifetime productions), throws Samantha
out, not only because she’s a troublemaker — earlier Danica has called her the
“worst roommate ever” — but she’s 18 and she’s aged out of the foster-care
system, where both she and Danica have spent virtually all their lives because
their mothers gave them up at birth and they were never adopted. Danica was the
product of a 16-year-old girl’s relationship with a kid from a minister’s
family whose church moved him out of town as soon as he knocked up Danica’s mom;
she gave up her daughter at birth and went on to a respectable life as Kate
Whitman (Cindy Busby), wife of Joseph Whitman (Jon Prescott, a surprisingly
attractive man for a husband in a Lifetime movie that isn’t trying for sinister reasons to kill his wife) and
business partner of Melissa Reed (Kelsey Griswold). The two women are about to
open a restaurant called the Kettle Black Bistro (as in “the pot calling the
kettle black”), which from the pictures we see of the exterior looks like it’s
in such a remote place it’s hard to believe it’s going to draw any business.
Samantha steals both Danica’s identity and her laptop and uses them to show up
at Kate’s and Joseph’s and present herself as Kate’s long-lost daughter, even
though it’s also established that she’s a psych patient who threw out all her
meds on her way out of the group home. At first Kate is overjoyed to see
“Danica,” especially since she just lost the baby she and Joseph had conceived
to a miscarriage (another
Lifetime miscarriage? This one is at least easier to understand because if
she’s old enough to have a teenage daughter Kate is probably nearing the end of
her reproductive years anyway), but then “Danica” starts acting very needy and getting jealous every time the impending
restaurant opening takes Kate’s attention away from her. “Danica” also gets
jealous of the garden Kate and Melissa planted together in Kate’s backyard and
she goes into it one night and rips it to shreds the night before the Whitmans
are supposed to be hosting a big barbecue to celebrate the return of Kate’s
daughter. She’s filmed in the act by Ivan (Jesse Pepe), who may or may not be
Melissa’s teenage son (the writers, Carlee Malemute and Jesenia Ruiz, weren’t
too clear about their relationship), who lives next door and was the one who
first alerted the Whitmans to the existence of the real Danica’s Web page on
which she was searching for her long-lost mother. Ivan e-mails the video to
Melissa but, when Samantha visits him as “Danica,” she persuades him to delete
it and manages with her own hacker skills to erase the copy Melissa sent the
Whitmans as well — and when Ivan seems like he’s going to keep the tape and get
it to the Whitmans himself, Samantha a.k.a. “Danica” pushes him down the
staircase between the two levels of his home, killing him. (This was a bit of a
disappointment because I was hoping Samantha would seduce him as an excuse to
pick his pocket and steal his smartphone, on which the incriminating video was
shot — if only because a soft-core porn scene between Sydney Sweeney and Jesse
Pepe would have been nice.)
Meanwhile, the real Danica receives a message from Melissa apologizing for the
way she treated the fake “Danica,” and of course the real one has no idea who
Melissa Reed is — but she quickly figures it out and reports to the police that
someone she used to room with at her group home is impersonating her and
putting the Whitmans in potentially mortal danger.
The climax occurs at a
mountain cabin that’s Kate Whitman’s secret retreat — and Malemute (this movie
was co-written by an Alaskan dog?) and Ruiz take pains to let us know that the
Internet and smartphone connections at this location are “spotty” and
intermittent — where Samantha kills a local police officer who shows up to
investigate and steals his truck. The presence of a dead police officer on
their front doorstep finally
alerts the Whitmans to the mortal danger facing them, and it ends with the cops
— led by Detective Stevenson (Owen Saxon, easily the hottest guy in a movie
quite full of appealing beefcake; he looks like a young George Clooney and I’m
hoping he’ll start getting the romantic, sexy roles Clooney is aging out of) — arresting
Samantha and the real Danica
reuniting with her mother at long last. Of course, there’s a postlude showing
Samantha in a mental institution — not surprisingly, she’s been ruled non
compos mentis even though we’ve seen her
commit two murders — holding a knife she’s made of a hair brush and seemingly
about to use it on Dr. Hopewell (Lisa Canning), the tall, sympathetic
African-American who’s trying to take care of her and help her return to
sanity. (The imdb.com page on this film lists this character as “Nurse
Hopewell,” but I distinctly heard her being addressed as “Doctor” in the
dialogue.) The Wrong Daughter is
pretty much a to-the-numbers Lifetime-formula movie, with such familiar
Lifetime names as Tom Berry and David DeCrane listed among the plethora of
producers, though like a lot of these productions it gains a lot from the
formidable acting of Sydney Sweeney in the lead. A lot of Lifetime movies have featured these girl psychos,
perky on the outside and demented on the inside, but while a lot of actresses
have played these bad-girl roles few have done so with the crack-brained
conviction of Sweeney — even though the script of this film did not give her any sex scenes and thus a key element of
this sort of character is missing. At least Malemute and Ruiz did not, as their Lifetime colleagues did in at least one
previous missing-daughter movie, have the (step)father be in on the plot and be
hot to trot for Samantha himself!
