Lifetime
It’s time for another Lifetime ‘Ripped from the Headlines’ true — but totally fictional — movie, this one titled Betrayed by Love. In this ‘true crime’ story, a wife and mother named Riley leaves her house after dinner and is chatting on the phone with someone. She mentions that she’s feeling a bit dizzy but okay to drive. Obviously she is not because it’s not long before she begins swerving all over the road and ends up in a single vehicle accident (even though the scene implies she hit someone head-on as we see bright headlights illuminating her terrified face), but her injuries are too severe and she dies on the operating table, leaving her husband and parents devastated (her son is kept in the dark until, it seems, teh funeral).
Cue the arrival of Riley’s sister Carrie, who just happens to be an investigative reporter (!) and seems to have some family issues by the way she interacts with her parents at their house (that are quickly forgotten), and she quickly gets embroiled in trying to find out what caused her sister’s accident. She also has a ‘friend’ on the police force, her ex, and she constantly bugs him for information, basically telling him how to do his job. None of the investigations into the car or Riley’s health, including toxicology reports, indicate there was anything to the accident but driver error. That’s not good enough for Carrie, especially after she sees Riley’s husband Adam having a verbal argument with another man at the funeral — who happens to be Riley’s old boyfriend Johnny Valentine — and when a mysterious woman named Sarah insists she needs to speak with Carrie privately (ya know, she could have just gone to the police). Sarah disappears when Carrie chases after Adam and the mystery man, but she is determined to get to the bottom of things. Her spidey senses begin to tingle when she meets a new nanny at Adam’s house (with the most ridiculously large front door you’ve ever seen), who was allegedly hired the night of the accident, and her friend Allison has information she needs to see about Adam’s finances, including brand new life insurance policies bought for Adam and Riley by Riley’s father. Allison is nearly killed and Johnny is shot to death, but Detective Dylan insists to Carrie that none of these things are related to Riley’s accident — until Carrie insists Dylan retests Riley’s blood for poison. If the test comes back positive, Carrie believes they have their killer — and a motive — or do they?
The following paragraph contains major spoilers, so skip to the next one if you haven’t yet seen the movie.
Betrayed by Love is actually a pretty efficient mystery thriller but it comes with two fatal flaws that detract from the mystery. The biggest one is the title which basically telegraphs the identity of the killer. The second is the most basic part of an investigation into the death of a spouse — the prime suspect is always the other half of the couple. In real life and in movies, the police always cast an eye on the surviving partner. Here, Detective Dylan is never once seen grilling Adam about the night of the accident, even after Carrie gives him the additional information about Riley feeling dizzy it still takes him time to condescendingly humor her. Dylan should be lucky to keep his job after pretty much bungling the entire case because there are several red flags waving over Adam’s house — he cooked dinner that night, the new nanny, his money pit real estate project, the new $5 million insurance policies. If Dylan couldn’t be bothered to put any of those pieces together along with the attempted murder and the shooting, he really should go into a new line of work that’s less detail oriented.
End of spoilers.
Where the film succeeds is in its casting. Sara Ball, who starred in Lifetime’s A Model Murder earlier this year, does a great job as Carrie, effectively showing her frustration with no one believing her sister was murdered while not being so arrogant that she becomes annoying. She brings the viewer on the journey with her, even though we all know who the culprit is long before anyone else does. That we’re with her on this is a testament to her performance. Andrew Fultz is also good as Adam, playing his cards close to his vest, but slowly unwinding as his financial situation grows more dire and Carrie keeps digging into his relationship with Lana, the nanny. Marc Herrmann is fine as Detective Dylan, doing the best he can with the material he’s given that paints him as a complete dimwit. Jessica Ruth Bell is also good as Lana, always keeping us wondering if she is just the nanny or something more to Adam until it becomes obvious what the situation is. She also gets a nice moment as Adam’s house of cards begins to collapse and she realizes what is actually going on. Ashley Ahlquist, Elyse Mirto, Christopher Hatfield and Alexandra Sophia Ruiz all do well with their limited screen time, Drake Cummings is just a bit too ebullient as Riley’s son, and model Cayman Cardiff makes a very fine acting debut as Johnny Valentine, a character who becomes pivotal in revealing more information about Riley’s relationship with Adam. He needs to get some work over on the Hallmark Channel.
Director Marla Sokoloff does a good job, as good as she can, in maintaining the ‘mystery’ but Peter Sullivan’s script is less a whodunit than a ‘how long will it take them to figure out who we know did it?’ The script could have used a few more red herrings, a few more suspects, something that made the culprit just a tad less obvious because when you know what happened five minutes in, you can only stay engaged if the actors and director are putting in the work. They definitely are, and that makes this an above average Lifetime movie.
Betrayed by Love has a run time of 1 hour 30 minutes, and is rated TV-PG.
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