Lifetime
What do Romeo & Juliet, the Hatfields and McCoys, and Bette Davis & Joan Crawford all have in common? They are all famous feuds. Lifetime’s latest ‘Sunday Night Thrills’ drama hopes to add to that canon with a new family feud movie (with a touch of the star-crossed lovers tossed in for good measure), Secrets on the Ranch … which looks more like a farm, if you ask me. So what are the secrets on this … ranch?
Romy Taylor (Camille Stopps) seems to have some recurring dreams about her sister Zara (a cameo appearance by Laura Provenzano) … who drops dead in her arms. Quite terrifying. Romy, coming out of a bad divorce and tired of city life decides to pack it all in and return to her family’s ranch since her mother Audrina (Dawn Lambing) is heading to Florida to live with another family member. The ranch is all Romy’s and it will be a lot of work to make it livable again. When Romy makes her first appearance in town, she does not get the friendliest of welcomes, but the new-ish diner waitress, Emma (Amanda Ip), seems friendly enough and isn’t afraid to talk back to an older woman named Patricia (Dawn Ford), who is even less than welcoming to Romy than everyone else. Romy then pays a visit to the local farm/hardware store to get some supplies to begin repairs and the man helping her offers his assistance. Turns out he’s the son of Patricia, Chip (Matthew Stefiuk), and when Romy accepts his offer to help, it is here that we learn about the long-standing feud between Romy’s family, the Taylors, and Chip’s family, the Slaters. But the two agree that this feud is their parents’ and they have no reason to drag it on. When another Slater boy, Brody (Jesse Collin), helps Romy to her car with her items there is an instant spark that suggests perhaps there will now be a new feud between the Slater boys over Romy. But, no, Chip is actually only there to help fix up the farm … I mean ranch. One day while Romy is digging in the garden, she hits something solid — bones! A full skeleton is revealed and even without a full examination Romy knows who it was — Zara, who had gone missing when Romy was a child, everyone assuming she had just followed through on her threats to run away.
Lifetime
The discovery rattles just about everyone in the town, many of whom suspect Romy’s absent father as the killer. Dad Jackson (Peter Nelson) fled town after a violent altercation with Patricia’s brother, Willy (Cory Cooper), that left him nearly in a vegetative state … hence all of the animosity from Patricia to Romy. Feeling she needs some support, Emma joins Romy for dinner at the ranch and asks a lot of prying questions. Girl, are you writing a book? Romy, obviously uncomfortable talking about the past and somewhat suspicious of Emma’s investigative journalism, should have just changed the subject. Is Emma up to something? Chip continues to help around the ranch, one new project rearing its head after another, and Romy and Brody begin to develop their relationship further. Romy at one point gets a visit from Detective Fitz (Xavier Sotelo), alerting her that her father had recently been spotted one town over, and he finds this whole situation — Romy’s return, the discovery of the body, Jackson’s reappearance after decades — highly suspicious. Romy asks her mother about this and she admits she’d been helping him with supplies, he’d show up every now and then to collect things and leave. And he does just that one night, startling Romy, but she has no time for him and tells him to take whatever he wants. Meanwhile, and Old West villain named Murphy (Morgan Bedard) — he literally wears a black hat and has a mustache (which he does not twirl, unfortunately) — keeps popping up to menace Romy but he really has nothing to do with the main story. But things to begin to happen around Romy and the Slaters. Someone enters the house while Romy is trying to sleep and steals Zara’s diary. Someone cuts the brakes on Patricia’s pickup, with Patricia immediately blaming Romy … and that turns the entire town against her, including her ‘friend’ Emma. Serious, that girl is shady AF and Romy does not need that in her life. Then after Brody returns from a livestock sale, allegedly, Romy finds Zara’s diary in his bag. Did he take it? He claims he had no idea how it got there, but Romy isn’t having it and sort of breaks up with him. She also notices several pages have been torn out, perhaps pages that would reveal the identity of someone Zara only referred to as ‘Freckles’. Is that the person she was in love with? Did she run off to be with ‘Freckles’? They were supposed to go to the prom together, so who is ‘Freckles’? That answer should be easy for the viewers to figure out once you begin paying attention to faces, and once Romy figures it out after a ‘bury the hatchet’ chat with Patricia, the truth is revealed. But are any of them ready to believe it?
Lifetime
Secrets on the Ranch, written by Courtney Cilman, is a decent mystery even if it does mosey along a bit slower than one would like. It takes a while for the reason for the Taylor vs Slater feud to be explained, and some of the characters are written in such a way that we don’t know who to trust or why some of them — Emma, I’m looking at you — run so hot and cold with Romy. Or why Brody keeps coming back because he and Romy have issues a couple of times that seem insurmountable. Also, the character of Murphy is the most unnecessary red herring ever. He’s only in a couple of scenes to provide some menace to Romy, but he never really figures into the overarching plotline. It would have been really satisfying if Brody had just hauled off and punched him after he got up in Romy’s face at the bar (where Emma is also the bartender). In general, the romance aspect between Romy and Brody feels just a bit forced. This ain’t the Hallmark Channel, so characters are not required to fall in love before the credits roll. That being said, the mystery surrounding Zara’s death is built up pretty well and the ultimate reveal may actually come as a surprise. Director Adrian Langley does a nice job with keeping the momentum building to the climax, and the ultimate resolution may be even more shocking than the reveal of Zara’s killer. Langley really integrates flashbacks and Romy’s dream/fantasy scenes into the story well as she occasionally remembers something about Zara and we see what she’s imagining in her mind as it takes place in real time. Much better than just relying on a lot of time jump flashbacks to confuse things. My only real issue was the use of a neon green light for many of the nighttime scenes instead of the traditional blue. It really was like there was a blazing neon sign outside of Romy’s house. No one would be able to sleep with that much light on them. Heck, it was brighter than the daylight! Other than that, Langley did a pretty decent job with the production.
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How he handled the actors is a bit more complicated. Camille Stopps is fine as Romy, though she keeps her emotions of a pretty flat plain. Sometimes, even in the most harrowing situations, she just comes across as a bit blank yet she still manages to get the viewers to be firmly on her side because of how the other characters treat her. It’s hard to judge from this particular performance if this is her acting style, or if she was directed to just be present but not over-react to any situation so she can at least appear strong to those opposing or threatening her. I suppose you could say her performance serves its purpose. Jesse Collin is mostly personable as Brody, but he also lacks some emotion at the times he should be very animated, such as when Romy accuses him of taking Zara’s diary. His claims of innocence don’t feel sincere enough to be believable … which perhaps was also what the director wanted to keep Brody in the mix as a suspect. At least he makes the relationship with Romy feel natural, like they are just getting to know each other without rushing into things. But after she literally pushed him out the door at one point, he really should have not come back. She should have gone to him to apologize.
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Matthew Stefiuk does a really good job as Chip. He’s pleasant upon his first encounter with Romy at the store, and he is willing to do anything, literally, to help her get the house back in decent condition. He’s even one of the few people who don’t believe she had anything to do with Patricia’s accident, blaming her own poor eyesight as the reason she ran her truck into a tree. There may be more to Chip than it seems, but Stefiuk never plays the character with an ounce of suspicion, and he’s probably the most likable of all the characters. Dawn Ford has a few good scenes as Patricia, easily spewing her venom toward Romy, but also proving to be a sensible person willing to hear things out when Romy comes to her after the accident. Ford gives Patricia more than one dimension. Amanda Ip gives an interesting performance as Emma. She seems at first like she is going to totally be the girlfriend Emma needs in town to support her as things intensify, but the way she asks all of her probing, invasive questions, not reading the room that she’s making Romy totally uncomfortable, makes it seem like there is an ulterior motive to her ‘friendship’. And then when she pretty much turns on Emma after Patricia’s accident only makes her previous interactions even more questionable. In reality, Emma is a pretty disposable character — she doesn’t figure into the climax at all and only has a quick ‘I’m sorry for believing you could try to kill someone’ moment, so perhaps Ip was just trying to make the most of her scenes to at least be memorable. Which she is, but maybe for not the right reasons because by the end I really disliked Emma and hoped Romy would rather not be friends. Just as disposable is the character of Murphy, so like Ip, Morgan Bedard has to really overplay the role to make him stand out. He brings a good sense of menace to the character but he just disappears midway through the story, like Emma having nothing to do with the actual storyline. Xavier Sotelo plays Detective Fitz with a sense of purpose, and from the first moment we see him you know this man means business even if his main contribution to the story is to tell Romy her father has been spotted. We don’t actually see him doing any other investigating though, so Sotelo makes an impression, brief as it is, but he also does not really have any bearing on the main plotline.
Dawn Lambing is fine as Romy’s mother Audrina, she says what she has to say, leaves, comes back for a minute after the discovery of the skeleton, then disappears again until the epilogue scenes. Peter Nelson also does a nice job in his one big scene as Jackson, when he comes to the house for supplies, and he also makes a return at the end. Laura Provenzano is very good in her flashback scenes as Zara, sometimes just a presence that Romy sees in her mind, making the most of her very short time in the movie.
Overall, Secrets on the Ranch is a decent if not remarkable mystery, offering up a pretty solid mystery with a lot of puzzle pieces to put together, with a pretty surprising climax. The production is also very good, and the performances are a mixed bag but no one is ever bad, most ranging from okay to excellent. Worth a look if it happens to be on or if you don’t have anything else to do.
Secrets on the Ranch has a run time of 1 hour 27 minutes, and is rated TV-PG.