Lifetime
Lifetime’s ‘Sunday Night Thrills’ takes viewers across the pond for a twisty, turny mystery thriller in the Scottish Highlands. And it has one of the most accurate titles for a Lifetime movie — Murder at Highland Manor.
The movie begins right off the bat with the murder of a young woman being tracked through the woods and onto a lake pier by a figure in a — no, not a Black Hoodie! — grey, hooded puffer jacket. There’s a twist for you. She’s whacked in the head with a shovel and falls into the water. Things switch gears to teacher Kate, who is about to take a sabbatical from her job to be a tutor for a young girl in Scotland, under the guise of needing to get away for a while. When she arrives at the manor, she’s greeted by Annie, mother of Hannah, and she seems eager to get Kate acclimated … although Kate is not fond of the tea she is served. Annie takes Kate to meet Hannah, who is at the stables with her favorite horse, Victory. Annie runs a horse breeding business, and Victory is on the verge of being sold much to Hannah’s disappointment. (She’s so disappointed that she attacks the child of the buyers when they come to see the horse, which pretty much scuttles the sale but Annie will do some work to get them to come back.) Hannah also has no time to entertain Kate, but Annie assures her everything will be fine, and if she wants to check out the grounds she’ll be perfectly safe after dark. Just be in the manor by 8:00 because that’s when they go into lockdown and the alarm is set. But Kate does some exploring after dark and hears a strange sound, finding hunky Scottish lumberjack Fraser chopping wood. The two seem to hit it off with some flirtation, but Kate has to get back before she’s locked out. When she finally has a chance to begin her lessons with Hannah, she learns the girl’s favorite subject is English — Kate’s too — and Kate notices all of her books on a shelf, pulling Little Women to begin her lessons. Mind you, the only person here with a Scottish accent so far is Fraser. Annie and Hannah are inexplicably American.
Lifetime
One evening, Kate is out an hears something in the stable and she catches someone in a puffer jacket snooping around. She has the person cornered, but they run past her, banging her arm hard, getting away. Fraser hears the commotion and comes to see what’s going on, and he takes the injured Kate back to his home on the property, checking out the large bruise, making small talk and casually removing his shirt, making sure she gets a good look. Kate and Annie are perplexed by the intruder, but Annie fears it may be her ex-husband. She reveals to Kate that they had a bad split, he’s dangerous and that’s why she took Hannah and moved to the remote manor, hoping he would never find them. If it is him, that could be a problem. The next day or so, Kate and Hannah go out onto the lake in a rowboat, but when Hannah drops her pencil in the water, she nearly capsizes them trying to reach it. But a phone drops from somewhere and Hannah recognizes it as her previous tutor’s phone. Earlier, Kate had seen one of Hannah’s drawings of a woman who she said was Olivia, her tutor, and Annie told Kate that Olivia had just up and left one day without so much as a goodbye. Kate goes into town after opening Olivia’s phone and seeing a picture of her with a man in front of a pub. At the pub, she encounters the man — who is wearing a puffer jacket — and he apologizes to her for the encounter in the stable, not meaning to do her any harm. She shows him the phone and he’s stunned, wanting to know how she knows Olivia. Kate reveals that Olivia is her sister, and she has come to Scotland under the guise of a tutor to see if she can figure out what happened to Olivia, especially after she found a makeshift memorial for her at the water’s edge. The man, Mark, was Olivia’s boyfriend and he assures her that Olivia was terrified of water and would never have gone near the lake, so the story of her drowning is absurd. Now Kate is confused since she was told Olivia ran off. Is she missing or dead? She confronts Annie who admits that Olivia did die, but she just used the story that she left because she didn’t want to upset Hannah more than she already was. But things aren’t setting right with Kate, and she doesn’t know that Fraser is actually Annie’s boy-toy/assassin who has followed Kate to the pub, and murdered Mark. Not long after, Annie announces the wonderful news that her ex is dead, so they no longer have to worry about him. But…
Kate encounters the ex, Dan, and realizes it’s Mark who is dead (they’re both men with beards, so easy mistake in the dark). Kate tells Dan where Annie and Hannah are living, but she gets confused when she figures out what Mark was looking for in the stables — baby items from a baby named Hannah who died not long after she was born. Dan keeps mentioning his daughter, Sophie, and he drops even more surprising news about his ex-wife. Kate is now fearful that they are all in grave danger and decides she must trust Dan is any of them are going to get out of this alive.
Lifetime
Murder at Highland Manor is a really engrossing mystery, written by Rachel Flynn, who played Olivia in the opening scene. Flynn takes her time in doling out the mysteries, not letting us in on Kate’s identity until later in the story, having the person in the stable who hit Kate come forth, which then makes us wonder who exactly was the person in the jacket who killed Olivia (all of the men, besides having beards, wear puffer jackets in this movie!). Flynn also gives us the nice, though tragic, twist of Fraser killing Mark due to mistaken identity, and the whole climax with the reveal of Hannah’s identity and the reason Annie brought them to the manor in Scotland makes for a wildly entertaining rollercoaster ride. Ryan Dewar does a fantastic job of keeping all of the story’s secrets, dropping the answers at just the right moment. If I have one minor issue, it’s that I knew five minutes after Annie was introduced that she was behind Olivia’s murder — even though it clearly could not have been her due to the height difference. But, there were still many secrets around her that I did not see coming, so it was nice to be surprised by all of the reveals.
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Brooke Burfitt does a great job as Kate. She has us on her side right from the beginning, and she does surprise us when she reveals Olivia is her sister. She connects well with Hannah, but she also puts too much trust in Fraser, and doesn’t begin to get suspicious of Annie until it’s nearly too late. But Burfitt just brings enough charm to Kate, and allows us to experience all of the twists and turns through her eyes. Megan Lockhurst is also very good as Annie, although she does play her a bit too wild-eyed at times, giving a little too much away about her character that makes all the sense in the world by the end. She is just too overly-suspicious, even while at other times she is just the perfectly normal mom looking out for her kid. If she’d just been a bit more subtle, I think the secrets revealed would have been even more surprising. Anja Cilia plays Hannah as very shy, reserved and quiet, which makes her violent outburst about the sale of her favorite horse all the more shocking. She totally give Kate the cold shoulder upon her arrival, but does slowly warm to her enough to trust her with her own feelings, connecting over Little Women. She really shows Hannah letting down her walls with Kate, and she plays the surprise she feels about her own identity with complete authenticity. Great work.
Lifetime
As for the men, Paul Luebke does a great job of being flirty with Kate, never giving away the plot that he’s really involved with Annie. It also comes as a complete surprise that he is willing to murder for her as if it’s the most perfectly normal thing in the world. Kevin Walls gives a nice, brief, performance as Mark, determined to find out what happened to Olivia, relieved that he can finally confide in someone when Kate shows up, but makes the bad decision to approach a car just sitting in the middle of the road. Adam Robertson is also very good as Dan, really going in to dad mode to save his daughter, and even having a nice little connection with Kate at the end.
Over all, Murder at Highland Manor is a taut thriller with a great mystery angle and a lot of twists to the story that will keep you off balance but thoroughly entertained. It’s a good watch!
Murder at Highland Manor has a run time of 1 hour 27 minutes, and is rated TV-14.