Lifetime
Lifetime’s brings the thrills and parental anxiety to its latest original production, The Boy with My Son’s Face, that features every parent’s nightmare scenario but spices it up with a lot of shocking twists and turns.
The Boy with My Son’s Face stars Italia Ricci and Luke Camilleri as new parents, Susan and Mark Webster. While Mark is focused on his ‘very important job’ at Susan’s father’s architectural firm, Susan is quickly learning that being a new mom is much more taxing than she thought. Waking up in the middle of the night to her crying son, Dylan, Susan hears a noise downstairs and puts the baby back in his crib to investigate. When she returns, the baby is gone and she races back downstairs where Susan sees the silhouette of a figure in the curtains. She swings a golf club but only breaks a planter, and Mark appears with the baby, telling her he was in his crib the entire time. Susan finds herself increasingly exhausted, and her bestie Alice suggests that she might be suffering from postpartum depression like her sister did, and even Mark is begging her to seek help and bring in a nanny. It takes Susan nearly pushing the baby carriage in front of an oncoming car to finally accept that she does need help, so Mark calls in a doctor friend to offer her some advice — medication to help with her symptoms and hire help to take care of the baby, assuring her it will not make her any less of a mother. Susan finally accepts, and Mark hires a nanny, but Susan quickly abuses the medication, putting her in a constant stupor, leading to a nose bleed and collapse at the doctor’s office. Susan asks the nanny, Amy, to not tell Mark … but she does, and Mark flies into a rage. Downing more and more pills, Susan is holding Dylan out on their patio overlooking a lake, her gaze focused on the water, walking slowly toward it but the next thing she knows she is on the patio again, Mark in a panic and the place swarming with police, one of them retrieving Dylan’s blanket from the water. Susan has no recollection of what happened and the search and rescue team is unable to locate the baby’s body, presuming she dropped him in the lake. A memorial service follows in quick order, and Mark assures Susan he is standing by her while she watches everyone from the doctor to her BFF to her own family making terrible statements about her. She stands trial and is convicted of murdering her child, sentenced to four years in prison. During a visit, Susan tells Mark not to come back anymore, leaving him stunned that she is going to divorce him.
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Four years later, Susan is released, adopts an alias and finds an apartment in a seedy neighborhood which seems to only house women, possibly all ex-cons. She gets a job at a local bar and befriends Cassie, who stands up for Susan after a customer tries to stiff her. Cassie is also her neighbor so they become friends. One day someone pounds on her apartment door and slips an envelope under it, and inside Susan finds a birth certificate and a picture of a boy with ‘Dylan’ written on the back. Susan tries to enlist the help of her journalist aunt, Peggy, to do a story about this new information but she tells Susan it would be a conflict of interest and the station would not touch it with a ten foot pole. Susan also learns that Mark has opened a new women’s medical clinic dedicated to the memory of Dylan, and there she encounters her father’s much younger wife, Ginny, who has no compassion for her because she has been trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant. After seeing a boy that she first thinks is Dylan, Susan returns to her apartment but her identity has become known to the others and she finds ‘Baby Killer’ painted on a mattress and on papers glued to her door. The apartment manager does take pity on her and cleans off the door, and Cassie takes Susan under her wing, giving her boxing lessons to help defend herself. Susan gets a thought to have Cassie look up Dr. Nicole Riley online, the doctor who prescribed her the pills, and they discover a tragic car accident killed Dr. Riley just days after the photo was delivered to Susan. Susan believes Dr. Riley was the one who left the photo as she saw the person running out of the building and getting into the same kind of car that was involved in the accident. Susan goes to Mark to show him the picture, but he thinks she is being cruel and sends her away. Cassie, however, doesn’t trust him. At her new job at a grocery store, Susan encounters her ‘friend’ Alice, who apologizes for all the terrible things she said to the press and then admits it was she who had the postpartum issues, not her sister, she was too ashamed to admit it. She mentions that she was on the same medication as Susan, but she says ‘red pills’ while Susan’s were blue. Susan runs to Mark’s clinic and makes a scene trying to get an answer about the color of the pills. As security grabs her, Mark appears and snidely tells her the pills were always red. When she gets back to tell Cassie what had happened, she finds Cassie’s place a wreck, her computer destroyed, assuming Mark had a hand in it. But you can’t keep a good hacker down, and Cassie takes Susan back to the bar and reveals her own little hacking system hidden in the back and they do some real digging, learning that Amy had a previous relationship with Mark. She goes to confront Amy at her antiques store and learns their attempt to have a child ended with an abortion. As Susan leaves the store, she sees Dylan’s baby blanket in the backseat of Amy’s car and starts pounding on the door which ends with Susan being arrested, and her parole agent gleefully sends her back to prison for violating her parole despite her claims that her son is not dead. Mark makes an appearance at visitation and Susan tells him she knows everything about him, including having his ex-wife as their nanny, but he just calls her unbalanced and suggests he’s going to do something terrible to Cassie. Susan is notified that she is being transported back to prison, but the van is stopped by protesters on the way and while the driver exits the vehicle to disperse the crowd, Susan jumps into the driver’s seat and takes off. But can she save Cassie and prove that Dylan is alive and Mark and Amy were behind his disappearance, or will she learn that she’s been delusional the entire time?
The Boy with My Son’s Face, written by Oritte Bendory and Barry L. Levy, is a gripping thriller that will keep viewers on the edge of their seats, wondering if Susan is losing her mind or if she’s just been a victim of gaslighting the whole time. The story builds and builds and offers one shocking twist after another as the truth is revealed, even learning that some of her information is even more twisted than she first thought. It’s all very intriguing, edge-of-your-seat stuff. Director Gigi Saul Guerrero, who also plays Cassie, does a great job of using layers of double exposures to give the impression of Susan’s mental state early in the film, and keeps the story moving forward at a breakneck pace, always offering up some surprises with each commercial break. She really does a fantastic job. If I have one little quibble, it’s that the blue pills Susan was taking … were obviously empty. Why did the prop department not put vitamin powder or something in them? With everything else being so on point, this is one little detail that was terribly distracting.
Also fantastic is the cast, headed by Italia Ricci. Ricci perfectly conveys Susan’s exhaustion and then her drug stupor (aided by Guerrero’s photographic effects). She never allows Susan to become totally defeated and she becomes relentless once the situation becomes much clearer. She accurately shows Susan’s heartbreak upon losing her son, but she also shows her resilience after she is released from prison, forging a new life and kicking into gear when reality sets in. She has to play a wide range of emotions, and if the folks at the Emmys took notice of these TV movies, she would surely be a contender for a nomination. Luke Camilleri is also quite good as Mark, completely appearing to be the loving husband, realizing his work is distracting him and committing to being there for his wife and child. Even as Susan is facing a trial he is her rock and gives a perfect performance of heartbreak once she tells him to stop visiting her. He even seems happy to see her when she comes to his house, but quickly turns when she shows him the picture of Dylan, becoming the villain of the piece as it seems he perhaps has orchestrated everything and is intent on keeping Susan in prison. He and Ricci also have a great knock-down-drag-out fight scene — her boxing lessons come in handy to a point — that ends in a shocking tragedy when someone else inserts themselves to break up the fight.
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Guerrero is fantastic as Cassie. She has all the street smarts Susan is lacking, she can look at serious subjects with a bit of humor, she is a strong woman who anyone would want as a friend because she’s lived a life in which she knows the value of having a strong support system. Even after her apartment is trashed, she doesn’t hold it against Susan. I’m sure it has to be a chore to direct and act in a movie, but Guerrero shows that she is terrifically skilled at both and is one of the movie’s brightest spots. Siobhan Williams is also excellent as Amy, seeming to be the perfect, caring nanny to Dylan, but you just know she’s going to blab to Mark about Susan’s incident at the doctor’s office. She even manages to make you feel sorry for her when Susan fires her for that, but then she also gets to become a completely different person when Susan tracks her down, showing a more sinister side to her character. Stephanie Izsak portrays Alice as a great and caring friend, but she makes the viewers turn on her the second she back stabs Susan to the media, and even though her apology later seems sincere, we hope that Susan just moves on and finds some new friends. Georgia Bradner as Susan’s much younger stepmother Ginny comes off as a total gold-digger, desperate to have a baby by her rich husband, treating Susan like dirt without giving her the benefit of the doubt, and then finding herself having to take a back seat to Susan when she comes to her father with the facts of what has been going on for the last four years. Roark Critchlow puts in what amounts to a cameo appearance as Susan’s father Neil, a bit overbearing at first (insisting that the baby’s name should be Neil Jr.), raging at the media but not answering their questions, and then putting Ginny in her place as he trusts his daughter. The one performance I have to take a little issue with is Shiraine Haas-Blake as Dr. Riley. Whether it was an acting choice or one guided by the director, Haas-Blake’s demeanor and line delivery is nothing but shady, making us think in that moment that she is up to no good. Haas-Blake has been terrific in some past performances, usually as a detective, so I wish she would have been more natural here because all you’ll think as she speaks is, ‘Susan, do not take any medication she prescribes for you!’
Lifetime
And we have to mention again that these TV movies always seem to come up with creative names for any online search engines seen on screen to avoid using Google or other well-known names. This time out there are two search engines seen on screen — Swiftysearch and SwiftyGram (a ‘dark web’ search engine).
All in all, The Boy with My Son’s Face is a taut, gripping, nail-biter of a thriller, well-written, excellently directed, and outstandingly acted by a stellar cast that all help to elevate this above the usual TV movie fare.
The Boy with My Son’s Face has a run time of 1 hour 27 minutes, and is rated TV-14.
The Boy with My Son’s Face | Official Trailer
Lifetime