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Spring break has come and gone, so LMN quickly shifts to its next theme of movies, ‘Home is Where the Harm Is’, and the movie that kicks things off, Don’t Trust the Couple Upstairs, actually adheres to that theme, keeping most of the action at the main characters’ home … except the titular ‘couple upstairs’ disappear after about five minutes.
Don’t Trust the Couple Upstairs begins with a woman asking a man violently chopping a yellow squash if he killed her. Who, we don’t know just yet. He turns, gripping the knife, and faces her. Three months earlier … we learn these two are the newly married Maria and Joe, and they have just bought a farm house far away from the city — but not too far (a two-hour drive, which to me is far) — for the quiet, laid back, small town, farm life. The town itself is quaint, and the grocery store owner, Orrin, gives the new couple an account so they can pay whenever they want. But the newlyweds run into a little trouble when they run into a gruff man named Phil, whom Orrin reveals to them is their neighbor, and he wanted to buy their farm to expand his acreage … until he was outbid at the last minute. Awkward. The couple is determined to get the farm up and running again … but they need help, so they make a video for social media inviting a couple to come live with them and help get the farm back on its feet. And it’s not long before a young couple, Vicki and Clay, show up for an interview. They seem like nice people, and Vicki has a lot in common with Joe … which bugs Maria a bit. Maria also notices that when Vicki talks about losing her father, Clay shows zero sympathy or concern, doing nothing to console her. This is a red flag in Maria’s book, but Joe wants to hire them on the spot. Maria says it wouldn’t be fair to the other applicants to hire anyone without seeing the others and they politely excuse Vicki and Clay. Joe is confused because there are literally no other applicants. Maria realizes he’s right and about five minutes later they have new roommates … even though neither of them have any experience working on a farm. But Clay assures them he can do odd jobs, work in the field and fix things, while Vicki … will decorate the house and paint because she’s an artist, not a farm girl. We should all question her artistic skills when she picks a perfectly hideous seafoam green color for one of the rooms Maria is about to paint, which is the same color my grandmother had in her house in the 1980s. Translation — it’s dated and no one should paint an entire room that color in this day and age. (Some may also call it ‘institutional green’ because it’s supposed to have a calming effect for patients in mental health care facilities. It’s not for a home!)
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Farm life goes on and nothing ever really seems to get done. The shutters on the house are dangling by a thread, then they’re fixed, then they’re dangling again thanks to a continuity error. Joe spends time teaching Vicki how to throw a baseball, because they’re both Angels fans, and Maria notices Clay eying up her chess board and learns he likes to play, but since he takes forever to make a move, she suggests he use an app and they can play the game remotely at their leisure. Maria is also getting worried that Vicki is being too flirty with Joe, which he acknowledges and assures his new bride that he has already told Vicki that she needs to tone it down. Problem solved. One day while Maria is working, Vicki says she’s going to go down by the lake to paint so she can catch the perfect light, and Maria says she will join her when she’s done. Join her she does except Vicki is nowhere to be found … until Maria looks down and sees her floating face down at the edge of the lake. Was it an accident or … murder? The police arrive and Joe and Maria are questioned by Detective Reed about their tenants and, oddly, there is no sign of Clay ever having been there. Everything in the bedroom that was his is gone, as if he were a ghost (unfortunately, the movie isn’t that interesting, because if he was a ghost that only Maria and Joe saw, that would be exceptionally special). It should be noted that while Maria was doing laundry one day, she picked up some of Clay’s clothes and he freaked out because there was something in the pocket of his jeans he needed, but when he grabbed the jeans it wasn’t there and he blew it off as if he was looking for a $20 bill. Something isn’t adding up.
Maria confides in her friends about everything, and she is wondering if her neighbor is responsible for the murder. Word got out real fast about Vicki’s death and suddenly the entire town thinks Joe and Maria had something to do with it, to the point that Orrin revokes their store credit! The nerve! Then Phil shows up again to make an offer to take the cursed land off their hands, but they plug on. One day, Maria gets some mail with a flash drive and when she opens the files there are pictures of Vicki with … Joe. Maria immediately believes this is why Vicki knew so much about him, and also knowing that Joe was a ‘serial dater’ before they got married — and they wed after just about three months of knowing each other — she flips out and throws Joe out of the house, refusing to let him have his say. (This seems to be Maria’s way of dealing with things.) Meeting up again with her friends at a coffee shop, Maria notices the shop is also in one of the pictures she has of Joe and Vicki, so she asks the employees if any of them recognize the couple. Not ringing any bells, but one asks if the woman in the picture is an artists, she is, and she remembers Vicki tried to sell her some of her work, but it didn’t go with the coffee shop’s vibe. But she also painted at the studio right around the corner — what are the chances! — so the owner might know more about her. He does, and he reveals her name is not Vicki, it’s Emma Spears and she owes him five months rent. Maria informs him he will not be receiving that from her at this point. When Maria goes through some of the paintings, she sees a portrait of … Clay, which is signed with the initials E.S. Maria has seen these initials before, notably on a sketch she was doing of Joe. While Maria and Amber continue digging, her other friend Brooke has to dash out to a meeting across town. Armed with all of this new information, Maria keeps calling Joe but he’s not answering his phone and she has no idea where he could have gone. What she doesn’t know is that Joe is tied up in a bedroom somewhere. Tied up poorly because he easily gets his hands undone, but when he gets to the bedroom door, the Black Hoodie makes a surprise appearance and konks him on the head, knocking him out and tying him better so he can’t escape again. Maria is sure Clay is involved, and she keeps trying to reach out to him, alerting him that she found what he was looking for between the floorboards in the laundry room — a key — and that she knows his real name is Connor, which was on the back of the portrait. The police also know his and Vicki’s real names, and have learned that Connor was part of a group of bank robbers, so the key must be related to the stolen cash. But will she be able to lure Clay back to the farm after he’s already ghosted her at one meet up, can she save Joe before it’s too late, will Vicki’s killer be unmasked, and can she and Phil call a truce (because he keeps showing up at her house to ‘help’ but he seems to be over-stepping a bit)? The most satisfying moment comes at the end when that god-awful seafoam green room is repainted.
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I did not have high hopes for Don’t Trust the Couple Upstairs, but the story by Steve Turner (Secret Life of My Other Wife) is actually pretty well constructed, setting up the situation nicely, and dropping little bits of information here and there, like Joe’s history being a key point, so that when it really becomes clear what is actually happening, you realize this story isn’t what you thought it was truly about. At least that’s how it should have been, and for many it may still be a complete surprise, but there is one single moment about midway through the story that, if you’re paying attention, clues you in precisely as to who is behind Joe’s disappearance, which then leads to who killed Vicki. There is a quick attempt to do a deflection to someone else, but it just is too obvious who is responsible so at that point you just have to wait eagerly for the climax to confirm your guess. Perhaps only seasoned viewers of these movies will figure it out easily, but that moment just hit me like a ton of bricks … and even when the perp is revealed, there is still a lot of business to be laid out as to how Vicki was involved that isn’t as obvious, so it is still satisfying in the end. One other little thing that bugged me was Maria’s reaction to Phil every time he showed up, offering to help but she never lets him actually say his peace. During their last encounter, he makes an offer to help again, and he’s obviously trying to make a deal to work their land for them, but it’s never verbalized although she just brushes him off with a ‘I’ll think about it.’ It would have been nice for them to actually not be at odds at that moment since she was really going through it. Director Brittany Goodwin (An Unstable Marriage) does a great job of building the mystery and not allowing any of the actors to overplay their roles to the point that you know who did it because of the way they are acting. This time it’s actually the writing that is the clue, not how the actor performed the dialogue or the scene, that gave it all away. Aside from that continuity error with the front of the house — perhaps the blame for that falls on the editor — this is a very solid effort even if it doesn’t completely wow in the end.
The cast is satisfactory for the most part. Alex Mitchell really has to do all of the heavy lifting here, appearing in almost every scene, playing detective when she should have just gone to the police (and apparently she does give Det. Reed some information, though we never really see that). Mitchell makes Maria a very strong woman, almost too strong to the point that she rarely shows emotion unless she’s lashing out at Joe or Phil or Clay, usually irrationally to the point that she doesn’t want to hear what anyone else has to say. That’s the way she was written, so job well done, it just makes it a little difficult to connect to the character, but are we supposed to connect with her? Rob LaColla Jr. brings a lot of life to Joe. He’s excited about the farm life, he seems to really have a good connection with Mitchell, making their relationship feel authentic, he also gets along well with Vicki and Clay, and he makes his anger completely understandable when Maria asks if he killed Vicki. It’s a shame when he goes missing for a large portion of the story.
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Brenna Skalski, last seen being dropped off a balcony in Pushed Off a Plane and Survived, does a really nice job as Vicki, making the character feel completely down-to-earth, never shady at all. It’s a shame she also is missing from most of the story, but her presence hangs over things until the end. Thomas King plays Clay as a bit stand-offish, but also someone with a hair-trigger temper. There is always a bit of mystery around the character, but he also disappears for a large part of the story, at times only communicating with Maria via text and the chess game app. It’s interesting in the end that his story really has nothing to do with the main plot, he just got dragged into everything and had to scurry once Vicki was killed. Tess Cline and Denise Culbreth offer Mitchell good support as her friends Brooke and Amber, both feeling really invested in her plight, with Cline in particular getting a moment to shine at the end. William Brock plays Phil with a chip on his shoulder for half the movie, and then he does genuinely try to be a good neighbor after the murder and Joe’s disappearance … even though Maria has no time for niceties. John D. Babcock III gets to show two side of Orrin, welcoming the new couple to town and then turning on them coldly, never allowing them to tell their side of the story after Vivki’s death. Anna Talakkottur is also very good as Detective Reed, showing her authority over the case, but also showing patience and compassion with Maria, at one point slyly calling Joe’s intentions into question without actually coming out and saying Maria should wonder about this guy who wanted to get married so quickly. Even when Maria goes rogue and investigates things before telling the detective, Talakkottur never allows the character to become angry and condescending. It’s one of the better portrayals of a detective in these movies.
In the end, Don’t Trust the Couple Upstairs is a solid mystery, well written and directed, featuring a decent cast, keeping you entertained and engaged in the story. If only there hadn’t been that one too obvious — though still subtle — moment that gave it all way just a bit too soon, this could have been a nearly perfect thriller.
Don’t Trust the Couple Upstairs has a run time of 1 hour 30 minutes, and is rated TV-14.