Lifetime
Lifetime’s ‘Sunday Night Thrills’ churns out an icky tale of deception and deadly obsession that is one in a long list of Lifetime network potboilers.
The Seemingly Perfect Family stars Rylee Reagan as the newly-turned 18-year-old Lexi Murdoch, celebrating her big day by aging out of the foster care system she’s been in since her mom went to prison. Concerned that she has no job and can’t get a job because she has no experience — and she rightly questions how she’s supposed to get experience if she can’t get hired — and has nowhere to live except for a temporary spot at a youth hostel, Lexi overhears another one of the girls, Blair, talking about an au pair job she has lined up but she really doesn’t want it, it’s just an easy way to make money. Lexi knows when and where the Sterlings are to meet Blair, and when they arrive she poses as Blair but tells them she goes by her middle name, Lexi. It’s clear from the second they say hello that husband Daniel has the hots for Lexi (and this follows LMN’s Let’s Murder Like It’s 1999! that features an older man slobbering over 18-year-old girls … ew) and his wife Chelsea takes note, directing her ire at Lexi as if it’s her fault her husband is a lech. To be fair, it seems that Chelsea is always a raging b*tch so maybe she’s just like that with everyone. Anyway, Daniel insists that they hire Lexi, and he falls all over himself when they get home and introduce her to their adopted baby — because Chelsea would never put her body through a pregnancy — Beau. Daniel immediately starts snapping pictures of Lexi holding Beau and then insists Chelsea take a picture of him with Lexi and the baby like it’s their (nearly perfect) family photo … and he isn’t scoring any points with his wife. Then he shows Lexi to her room and hands her a brand new phone. Lexi is overwhelmed by it all, and maybe just a little creeped out. While Lexi tries to get into taking care of Beau, the household tension is so thick you can cut it with a chainsaw, and Lexi can hear Daniel and Chelsea arguing about her and his behavior on her first night in the house. Daniel catches Lexi standing at the top of the stairs listening, but he assures her that everything is fine.
Lifetime
The next day, Chelsea apologizes to Lexi but when she leaves for work she purposely leaves a file folder on the table. Later, Daniel calls Lexi and asks her to bring the folder to Chelsea — why didn’t Chelsea just call? — and she packs up the baby and heads to Chelsea’s office where Chelsea then snaps at her that she needed the file an hour ago. But Chelsea notices a spark between Lexi and assistant Marcus (an obvious set-up) that she gleefully reports to Daniel while the three of them are having dinner that night. Lexi tries to play it off, and Daniel is clearly in his feels about this. There is also another issue that has arisen — an expensive crystal vase in the bedroom has disappeared. Lexi claims she broke it but the fact of the matter is Blair made an appearance to shake down Lexi since she stole her job (that she didn’t want), and blackmails her for half of her pay or else she spills the beans. And she takes the vase for a down payment. But the thought that the vase has been broken enrages Chelsea and she wants Lexi fired, but Daniel persists that she stay so Chelsea decides the cost of the vase will come out of her pay. On Lexi’s first day off, she’s planning to go into town to have lunch with Marcus, but she just tells Daniel she’s going shopping with the cash she just received. He also replaced the money Chelsea took out, but that’s their little secret. He also recommends a pizza place for her to grab some lunch but, darn it, the other car is at the shop so how will she get to town? Ride share, of course! She and Marcus do go to the pizza place and who should walk in but Daniel, claiming he was craving pizza after telling her about the place. When Marcus excuses himself for a minute, Daniel takes the opportunity to tell her that people at Chelsea’s office have complained about Marcus getting handsy and scary angry if they call him out, so instead of seeing through Daniel’s ruse, Lexi gets all weird and ends the date, leaving with Daniel who then takes her to the local airfield where he gives flying lessons in his plane, taking Lexi up for her first ever flight and showing her a bit of how to fly. She is terrified but exhilarated by the experience, but it’s Daniel who gets a little handsy in the cockpit making her very uncomfortable. Meanwhile, Chelsea has taken it upon herself to snoop in Lexi’s room and she discovers a collection of letters from her mother … from prison … which also reveal that nothing Lexi told them about her mother or her experience as an au pair (she took care of children, yes, but in the foster homes she lived in) was true and she tells Lexi to leave the house that night. This does not sit well with Daniel but he begs Lexi to stay until he can find a replacement, and he assures her Chelsea is fine with that. It’s a bit frosty the next morning and Daniel asks Lexi to go to the grocery store while asking Chelsea to get the Halloween decoration out of the basement. After he leaves, Chelsea flips the script and tells Lexi to do the grunt work while she goes to the store, and Lexi has no choice but to play nice. After Chelsea leaves, Lexi makes her way down the stairs and her foot gets caught on a string across the steps, leaving her unconscious at the bottom of the stairs. Daniel comes home and finds her — carefully stepping over the string — and gets her to the hospital. She has a bad sprain and a mild concussion but she can come home after a night at the hospital. At home, Daniel is angry about Chelsea not doing what he asked and it becomes clear he was trying to kill Chelsea. Failing once, he will not fail again and he brutally pummels her with another heavy crystal vase. Lexi comes home, Daniel tells her Chelsea had to go out of town for a few days, which did not match up with his previous comments that Chelsea would be at a conference for the week, so she calls Marcus to find out if Chelsea has been to the office. He tells her he only got a text saying she had a meeting out of town and thought it was odd that she would miss the conference she attends every year, and all of Lexi’s warning bells start to ring. She attempts to flee the house, but Daniel catches her, chloroforms her, and when she wakes up she’s chained up in the basement in a makeshift bedroom. He hopes she will come around and they can be the ‘perfect family’ but he warns her not to look in the freezer. Of course she does and is horrified. Things get busy at the house as Blair makes a return, followed by Lexi’s mother fresh out of prison, but will Lexi be able to get anyone’s attention so she can be free and expose Daniel for the creepy predator he is?
Lifetime
The Seemingly Perfect Family took three writers — Amy Dawson, Ken Sanders and Daniel West — to come up with a story that makes no pretenses to be anything other than what it is: a creepy tale of obsession. There is no suspense to be had in this situation. Daniel doesn’t slowly reveal his intentions, it’s clear from the get-go as he leers at Lexi what he wants. Chelsea is painted as an unpleasant harridan from the start, making the marriage between her and Daniel toxic from the moment we meet them. These are two people who have no business being married, and bringing a poor, defenseless, innocent child into the mix is not going to help them … and it’s only going to affect the child’s emotional well-being. It’s just unpleasant to spend any time with them. And while Lexi seems to feel that the vibe is off with Daniel, why does she not talk to Marcus about the accusation? Or Chelsea? Because it is obvious Chelsea set them up so she certainly would deny Daniel’s claims. But as usual — and we even see this stupid behavior on reality competition shows — she takes the word of someone with an obvious agenda instead of talking with the person in question. Marcus seems like a much nicer person than Daniel, so why Lexi would take his word about Marcus is just a bit aggravating. There’s also a major plot point that Daniel mentions — there are cameras all over the house so Lexi can just use the app on her new phone to check on Beau. Okay, so why didn’t Chelsea just look at footage to see what happened to the vase? Are they not recording anything? Or are the cameras just baby monitors that only broadcast live? It’s not clear, but one of the three writers could have come up with some explanation. And later when Daniel tells Lexi to change her clothes before he attempts to fly off with her and the baby, she’s still chained around her ankle. How did she change her jeans?!?! He didn’t unlock the shackle, he just gave her the clothes and left to gather up the baby. There are just some details that don’t add up. Director Lisa France does manage to keep the story moving, building some nice tension as the situation with Daniel escalates, doing her best to gloss over some of the dangling plot threads.
Lifetime
Rylee Reagan gives a nice performance as Lexi. She builds some sympathy for the character as she learns she’s basically being tossed out into the world on her birthday. She also does a good job of making us aware that she is skeeved out by Daniel, but she’s not written in such a way that she should have had more excuses to not be alone with him. In the story, she spends very little time actually taking care of the baby, but that would be boring so we have to suspend disbelief so the story can play out between her and Daniel. But Reagan does a very good job of grounding Lexi and making her the one character we can sympathize with. Bourke Floyd plays Daniel on the edge from beginning to end. It’s a wonder he isn’t drooling every time he’s with Lexi, but his wild-eyed expressions say it all. There is nothing subtle about his performance. We clearly know what type of person Daniel is, and Floyd doesn’t, or isn’t given the chance, to show any shades of gray in Daniel’s character. Any rational person in Lexi’s position would have skedaddled because of his behavior. Also showing zero signs of subtlety in her performance is Anna Morgan Neugent as Chelsea. She is full-on judgmental at the interview with Lexi, and then she is just a b*tch on wheels for the rest of her time in the story, almost always angry — Daniel gives her good reason to be but there were obviously issues before Lexi arrived on the scene — while getting a chance to cackle sarcastically as she relates how cute it was to see Lexi and Marcus hit it off, gleefully poking at Daniel’s obvious attraction to the girl. She gets one moment to appear human with Lexi when she apologizes for her outburst and knee-jerk reaction to firing her, but thirty seconds later we can see it was all an act and there is nothing pleasant about this woman. You can’t say the performances of Floyd and Neugent are bad, because they are doing what they were hired to do, but they were given caricatures to play and they have no room to try to humanize their characters. You kind of feel sorry for an actor who gets stuck with such a one-note character because their performances are dictated by the writers. They do a great job at playing what was written, but I’m sure both actors have much more range than they are allowed to show here.
Violet SinClair also does a good job as Blair, easily blackmailing Lexi and casually taking the crystal vase but also becoming very concerned when she returns and finds Lexi chained up in the basement. Sarah Nicklin also does a very good job as Lexi’s mother Amber, really brining some humanity to the character even as she’s first shown in prison. But she makes us feel that she truly does love her daughter, and when she shows up at the house and is given some cock-and-bull story about Lexi just up and leaving, she doesn’t buy it and snaps into tiger mom mode to get to the bottom of things. Brennen Suttle is totally adorable as Marcus, making puppy dog eyes at Lexi, totally polite and non-threatening and then completely baffled by her abrupt attitude change. And even after she unceremoniously ditched him, he’s still pleasant with her when she calls about Chelsea. Why Lexi would believe he was some kind of sexual assaulter is baffling. Paul Ryden plays Hank at the airfield, a pleasant gent, and he manages to keep things calm after Daniel takes off with Lexi and Beau and things take a turn that forces Lexi to fly and land the plane herself. The only odd part is that he just stops talking to her as she’s coming in for the landing. Umm, writers, all three of you, should he not be giving her step-by-step instructions after he tells her they have a visual on her? Lowering the flaps and pulling up on the nose hardly seem like the only steps to landing a plane. And Fred Galyean pops up again, this time as the social worker Mr. Howard, who has to break the news to Lexi about her eviction on her birthday but still shows her some compassion even though he can’t do more than give her recommendations on where she can go until she gets on her feet.
I can’t say that the title of the movie, The Seemingly Perfect Family, makes any sense because the dynamic of Daniel, Chelsea and Beau is anything but perfect and no one from the outside looking in would seemingly think they were perfect, and if the title refers to the family Daniel has conceived in his head with Lexi swapped out for Chelsea … well that one is just all kinds of wrong and, again, isn’t close to seeming perfect. While the story has little build up and two of the main characters are toxic, one-note creations, they all still manage to make the best of what they’re given so that the movie is never boring but it will almost certainly have you yelling at the TV more than once out of frustration with the situations. It’s not great, and it’s not the worst movie Lifetime has ever broadcast, but it could be a time killer if nothing else is on.
The Seemingly Perfect Family has a run time of 1 hour 27 minutes, and is rated TV-14.