Lifetime
Lifetime’s latest ‘Ripped from the Headlines’ movie is one firmly set in the present day and actually tells a cautionary tale. The Killer I Picked Up stars Patrice Goodman as Angela Turner, a woman whose bosses don’t seem to feel adds much to the company beyond what she already does, so in order to support her daughter (her husband died a few years earlier) she considers taking on a ‘side hustle’ — joining a rideshare company, just on weekend evenings. Angela’s daughter Brianna (Eden Cupid) isn’t too thrilled about her mom driving around at night with strangers in her car, but Angela assures her she will be done by midnight, no late night, after bar pick-ups. Angela’s co-worker DJ supports Angela’s decision even if it means she has to pick up the slack at work when Angela falls asleep at her desk.
Things go well, all of Angela’s riders are polite — well, except for the one already drunk passenger who insists she join him and his friends for karaoke — but one pick-up is more than a bit sketchy. The address is in the middle of a dark alley behind some industrial buildings. Excuse me, but if I were the driver I’d cancel that and keep going. But Angela stops and waits for the passenger … who pops up at her window looking less than appealing with his straggly hair, beard (girl, can you not see it’s all from Party City?) and dirty hoodie, scaring the bejeezus out of her, but she lets him in the car regardless of how threatened she feels. She drops the man off, happy to be rid of him and goes on to her next passenger, a handsome man named Aaron (David D’Lancy Wilson). Even at that first ride Angela feels comfortable again and might even think Aaron is cute, but she keeps it professional, drops him off and heads home.
After another night of driving, she arrives at another destination and the creepy guy tries to attack her but as luck would have it, Aaron is there to save the day because she just happened to be at the hospital where Aaron works. Angela reports the assailant but it is impossible to track the anonymous man down and Angela begins to think twice about her side hustle. Shopping with Brianna one day Angela again bumps into Aaron, and his nephew Jason, in the store — even though he lives on the other side of town with his sister and nephew for the time being — and Brianna decides to invite the men over for dinner so Angela and Aaron can finally break the ice (Brianna also thinks Jason is a snack, so the invite was as much for her as it was for her mother). Things go well, but Aaron pushes a little too hard with a ‘hostess gift’, a pair of gold leaf-shaped earrings, which Angela refuses because it’s a much too personal gift for a first ‘date’. Aaron is taken aback because he got a matching pair for Brianna, but Angela asks him not to tell her because she’s be mad her mom didn’t accept them.
Lifetime
As the relationship grows, Angela begins to sense that Aaron is becoming a bit too overbearing and jealous, snapping at her for talking to a man at the bar while she waits for Aaron to arrive for dinner. After hearing about this, DJ also begins to see the red flags and her first meeting with Aaron is chilly, to say the least. Unfortunately for DJ, working late at the office one night ends with her punching out … for good. Angela is concerned about DJ until she gets some texts from her, and then finds a GPS tracking device in her car. Furious, she believes the creepy passenger is stalking her (she does not know about the hidden camera in her bathroom at home that someone is watching) and tosses the device into the woods where she and Aaron are about to go for a run (well, she runs but I can’t really call what Aaron does running). Can Angela defeat the culprit before she and Brianna end up like the mother and daughter seen being abducted — and as we learn later, murdered — at the beginning of the movie?
The Killer I Picked Up is a serviceable thriller. At least the promotional artwork doesn’t give away who the killer is like it did with There’s a New Killer in Town because there are at least two suspects here — the passenger and Aaron. The question throughout the movie is — is the passenger the stalker or is Aaron the stalker? The answer is revealed to the viewers about midway through the movie, and that places us one step ahead of Angela, ratcheting up the tension as we watch her remain unaware of the dangers around her. At least Brianna has a good head on her shoulders, and even Jason steps up to help. Tyler Richardson’s script mostly avoids making Angela a damsel in distress (although a scene where she’s running from her stalker through the woods and trips over nothing is a tired, old horror movie trope … I’m surprised a cat didn’t jump out from behind a tree as well). The somewhat early reveal of the stalker situation also works because there had to be an unseen witness to help pull things together for the climax. Annie Bradley’s direction is also very good at keeping things tense, and she gets some good performances from her cast.
Goodman is very good as Angela and makes the character someone the audience wants to yell ‘girl, you in danger’ at. D’Lancy Williams does a great job at showing the different sides of Aaron with enough balance to make the audience suspicious of him, but not so glaringly over-the-top that we get frustrated with Angela not seeing the bright red flags. Even if he’s not the stalker, his jealousy issues are enough to push Angela away. Eden Cupid, last seen in There’s a New Killer in Town is wonderful as Brianna. She is written as a pretty savvy teen who picks up on signals more than Angela does, and she easily senses danger when it literally comes knocking at her front door. She also has good chemistry with Kolton Stewart, who plays Jason. He also gives a nice performance, and we actually root for these kids to make it through this situation. Joanne Boland’s DJ offers good support for Angela, and Carlos Gonzalez-Vio is appropriately creepy and menacing as John, the passenger who kicks of the whole thing. Raven Dauda plays Aaron’s sister Whitney, and her character is written to book Angela for a ride so she can check her out since Aaron hasn’t introduced them yet. The way she plays it when she reveals to Angela who she is would have been enough for anyone to reconsider their relationship with her brother. That was almost a bigger red flag than Aaron’s jealousy!
The Killer I Picked Up is, in the end, a tidy little thriller that manages to sustain the tension until the end, falling in the middle category of Lifetime movies between must-see and barely watchable. It does what it sets out to do, and perhaps will make women think twice about a side hustle that puts them in danger with each pick-up (try a grocery delivery service instead!).
The Killer I Picked Up has a run time of 1 hour 30 minutes, and is rated TV-PG.
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