Movie Review :: Lifetime Movie Network’s A House Built on Lies

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I don’t know why LMN’s newest ‘Home is Where the Harm Is’ movie, A House Built on Lies, has such a low rating on IMDb, but after the dreadful offerings from the previous two weeks this one is Citizen Kane by comparison. That actually sounds snarky towards this film, making it sound like anything with even a passable storyline or acting would be better, but this one is actually really good because in the end, it’s not really what it seems to be (and perhaps that’s why viewers are just kind of meh about it … and perhaps a particular plot point also turned them off). Be warned, if you have not yet seen the movie but plan to, come back afterwards to read the recap and share your thoughts in the comments. It will be unavoidable to talk about the movie without revealing major plot points (and as the movie has already aired, nothing here is technically a spoiler, but proceed with caution).

A House Built on Lies stars Kimberly-Sue Murray and Ian Kilburn as happily married house flippers Daisy and Chris Clifton, in the process of finishing their latest project while Daisy is on the verge of finishing her own little project — giving birth. Daisy and her bestie, Louise (Diana Salvatore), pop by the property to check on Chris, and he tells Daisy that he has to work through the night to finish putting the window in the attic room but he promises this is the last night she’ll have to sleep alone. Louise obviously hates Chris, calls out their PDA and heads back to the car where she spots a suspicious figure in a bright yellow rain slicker — no Black Hoodie in this movie! — trying to hide behind a telephone pole. She looks back at the house then back at the pole and the figure is gone. The friends head home, Louise hangs out and they both fall asleep on the couch, awakened the next morning by a pounding on the door. Daisy goes to answer and it’s a cop with some bad news — her husband is dead, apparently after falling from the window onto the landing below. We did see the fall after hearing Chris arguing with someone, so this was an obvious case of homicide, right? And if so, who could have done it? That will have to wait as the shock sends Daisy into labor, and she wakes up in the hospital after undergoing an emergency C-section, with mom and baby both fine. For some reason, there is a really surly nurse who rips a piece of tape off the back of Daisy’s hand, and the doctor tells her that she suffered some injury to her kidneys but with some prescribed medication, she should be okay in a few months. But she has to be very careful to follow the dosage instructions.

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Daisy doesn’t want to go home alone, so Louise offers to let her stay at her house even though it’s small and Louise would have to sleep on the sofa. But out of the blue, Chris’ best friend Zack shows up after not being at the house with Chris that night like he was supposed to be. According to Chris, Zack just had some personal business to attend to but it was clear there was a falling out. Zack offers to bring Daisy to his house, which is much larger, but she’s hesitant because Zack has a history of alcoholism. He assures her he’s completely sober, and she leaves with him, but when she gets to the house she sees an empty bottle of booze. Zack tells her when he heard of Chris’ death, he almost started drinking but poured it down the drain instead. The police come to question Daisy, not so subtly suggesting that she is a suspect, and she lets slip that Chris and Zack had a falling out so now she’s implicating him as well. Since this is a homicide investigation now, the coroner will not be releasing the body for the funeral, so they’ll just have to make do with a memorial ceremony. Adding to Daisy’s stress is the fact that her insurance has lapsed because the premiums haven’t been paid for two months, and she discovers the $100,000 they had in the bank is gone, Daisy believing Chris took it because the budget for the house renovation had ballooned. Zack is too upset to attend the memorial, but a mystery woman in a big black hat and big sunglasses slips by Daisy and Louise, and then a woman named Mrs. Simpson approaches Daisy to offer her condolences. Neither Daisy nor Louise seem happy to see the woman, and it turns out she was their foster mother, and they did not have a great childhood with her, especially after her own son died will playing with Daisy, and she has blamed Daisy for his death for all these years, but she really seems to want to have a chat with her. While Daisy is delivering her eulogy for Chris, the mystery woman storms out of the church leaving Daisy a bit bewildered. Things take a turn at Zack’s house when Daisy hears some rustling about late in the evening, and when she goes to check she sees Zack with a trash bag of bottles and … he’s wearing a bright yellow rain slicker. Then in the morning he seems to stumble into her room, possibly drunk or hung over and fumbles around by the bed, Daisy paralyzed with fear. After he leaves the house she calls Louise and gets the heck out of there, and decides the only place she can feel safe at the moment is the house they were going to flip, which will also give her a chance to finish the work so they can sell it. Louise decides right then and there that she’s moving in with Daisy to take care of her and the baby, because Daisy really isn’t physically up to doing a lot of intensive labor. While they are leaving Zack’s house, Daisy also thinks she sees Mrs. Simpson walking away from her down the sidewalk.

But they aren’t in the house more than 24 hours when Daisy hears noise from downstairs, and when she she goes to investigate she sees muddy footprints across the floor, and someone had been rifling through Chris’ box of personal belongings. When Daisy looks out the window she sees a figure in a yellow rain slicker dart across the lawn but they are gone before she can see who it is. Louise then tells her about the person she saw the day Chris died so Daisy is certain Zack killed Chris over whatever it was that they were fighting about. Zack’s only alibi for the night of Chris’ death is that he was driving around to clear his head — which is eventually proven true after reviewing traffic cam footage — and he finally admits to Daisy why the two had the falling out … Zack told Chris he was in love with him! Chris was apparently a big homophobe, or just in total shock and unsure of how to address the revelation, so instead of just kindly turning him down, he basically told Zack to get out of his sight and that is why he was not working with Chris the night he died. So with Zack no longer a suspect, who could it be? Daisy goes through Chris’ box and finds a letter from Mrs. Simpson, indicating that she’d been attempting to get in touch with Daisy but she suspected Chris was not giving Daisy her letters. It’s all beginning to get to be a little too much for Daisy, and she seems to be overly self-medicating with her prescription but she insists on going to see Mrs. Simpson to see what she wants. She takes a ride-share to the house and Daisy pops another pill because of a massive migraine she’s experiencing, and the conversation over tea — where Mrs. Simpson does admit being outside of Zack’s house that day — doesn’t get too far before Daisy begins to feel very woozy and she runs out of the house, ending up in the middle of the street right in front of an oncoming car. Did Mrs. Simpson drug her, or has she been taking too much medication? Whatever happened, the surly nurse is back on duty telling Daisy what an awful mother she is, and the doctor confirms she had a higher dosage than prescribed of her own medication in her system so the prescription is revoked and she can only take over-the-counter meds … unless she begins abusing them too, and at that point CPS is going to have to be called in to take baby James. Louise does all she can to keep Daisy resting and comfortable back at her house, stepping up to care for the baby so Daisy can sleep, but things just aren’t adding up to her. She is constantly in a drugged-out state, and at one point she hears Louise talking to someone downstairs and she sees a man with her and James, but is she hallucinating? (We never really know who the man is.)

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Daisy decides to head over to the house and try to get the window in place, and after she somehow manages on her own she trips over a loose piece of flooring and finds a black bag hidden below the floorboards. Inside is the missing money from the bank account and … a bracelet with the letter T as a charm. With the window in place, Daisy contacts their realtor to show him the house, and while doing so she gets some text messages from Mrs. Simpson telling her that she is happy to come by any time to continue their talk. Daisy is obviously a bit drugged out with the realtor and after seeing a couple of rooms he senses something is wrong and tells her he’s seen enough (he’s already seen the house before) and tells her he’s surprised she’s selling because the last time he talked to Chris, he was told they weren’t selling the house. Daisy doesn’t know what to think at this point. Louise helps her back to bed, but she is in a very feverish state, stumbling downstairs where she sees a door open. The kitchen has been ransacked and she dials 9-1-1 to report a break-in, a figure in a yellow rain slicker crossing the room behind her, then smashing a vase over her head and running out. Out of nowhere, Mrs. Simpson shows up and finds Daisy, getting her to the hospital. The surly nurse is there and tells Daisy she overdosed again and hit her head, and the police are on their way. Despite Daisy’s claims of a break-in, the nurse keeps insinuating Daisy OD’d and even got herself some Black Market meds because the Vicodin wasn’t enough. Daisy has no idea what the nurse is talking about and when she tries to sit up, the nurse grabs her and pushes her back down, telling her she should have died for what she did to Chris. Daisy then notices the nurse wearing a bracelet with T and C charms on it. She whispers in Daisy’s ear asking where her money is, and Daisy then sees a yellow slicker hanging in the hallway. Daisy now realizes it was the nurse who broke into her house … to which the nurse corrects her that it was her house, and Chris was going to leave Daisy for her and they were going to live in the house, and if Daisy doesn’t tell her where the money is she’ll go back and look for it herself, threatening to inject Daisy with something. Daisy calls out for help and the doctor steps in, Daisy claiming the nurse attacked her, but the nurse says she was just trying to sedate Daisy. The nurse runs out and Daisy fights off the doctor to give chase, and the police turn the corner of the hallway, running into the nurse whose name is Tyra. She tells the cops that Daisy is hysterical and Daisy says she’s lying, telling them that Tyra killed Chris and she has a yellow jacket. Tyra insists that Daisy killed Chris, that Daisy took everything from her, from Chris to the house to the money. All the changes he made to the house were for her. But then he changed his mind. It was her at the house that day, spotted by Louise. Chris saw her from the window and shook his head no. She claims that was the last time she saw him alive (so now it seems Tyra was the mystery woman at the funeral). But she still insists that Daisy killed Chris because she found out about the affair. Daisy denies this and keeps pointing out that Tyra has been breaking into her house and attacked her. Tyra blurts out that Daisy has her money, the savings Chris was going to give to her, admitting that she went to the house to look for it. Well, now Tyra has admitted to home invasion and physical assault, but she tries to deflect to Daisy overdosing twice. She calls Tyra crazy, and assumes that she has been the one drugging her because she was there every time Daisy was brought to the hospital. Tyra lunges at her and calls her a liar, but the cops grab her and inform her that she is obviously under arrest. Daisy is certain now that Tyra killed her husband.

The next day, the doctor is good with releasing Daisy, confirming her body has recovered from the overdose but she needs rest. And she has a visitor waiting … Mrs. Simpson, whom Daisy learns brought her to the hospital. Emily offers to drive Daisy home, and tells her she’s glad she decided to swing by the house that day, but Daisy is wondering how she even knew where she was. Emily tells her that she makes it a point to keep up with her life. Daisy’s not too thrilled to know Emily has been keeping tabs on her, but Emily just says she wanted to make sure she and Louise were okay. But why after fifteen years is Emily suddenly popping up in their lives? Emily tells her that as she’s gotten older, she’s looked back on her life and realized she treated Daisy and Louise unkindly, putting her own grief over the death of her son on their shoulders, and after all these years she just wanted to see Daisy to apologize. It’s a very emotional moment for them both, and when Emily drops Daisy off at the house, she turns and tells Emily that she forgives her, while Louise watches from the front door landing. Later over some soup that Louise prepared, Daisy is giving her all the details about Tyra, explaining how she was giving her some Black Market meds and then she suddenly pauses before putting the soup in her mouth. The phone rings and Daisy answers, the detective calling to let her know that multiple sources and surveillance video place Tyra on duty at the hospital the night of Chris’ death. She also confessed to the home invasion and assault, but denied trying to poison Daisy so someone else has been feeding her the drugs if she hasn’t been doing it herself. Louise brings Daisy a cup of tea … and the realization hits her like a ton of bricks. She goes back to her room, but James’ crib is gone. Louise enters and tells Daisy she forgot her tea. Daisy wants to bring James back into her room, but it’s late and he’s already asleep in Louise’s room, so they can do it in the morning. The most important thing is that Daisy gets her sleep. Have some tea. They make some pleasantries, but there is obvious tension in the room. Daisy has not had her tea, and she makes a call to someone very late into the night, then quietly slips downstairs and retrieves the bag with the money and bracelet from up inside the fireplace chimney. In the morning, Daisy is refreshed and wants to take James for a walk in the park. Louise seems surprised that Daisy is so chipper and tries to talk her out of any strenuous activities but Daisy insists. Louise has no choice but to hand James over, but she does not look happy when Daisy leaves. As Daisy makes her way down to the park, a car pulls up beside her and it’s Zack (so that is who she called earlier). She puts James in the back seat and hands him the bag of money, telling him to not let either out of his sight. Daisy sneaks back to the house and overhears Louise on the phone with her boss asking for more time off. (She’s a teacher and had been on spring break for the last two weeks.) Daisy makes her way to Louise’s room, frantically goes through her drawers and closet and finds a bag of drugs. Louise comes in the room and tells her she didn’t have a choice, and all of this is Chris’ fault. She warned Daisy before they were married that he was a cheater, and she knew when she saw that person at the house that it was the woman he was cheating with, but she was scared and angry and didn’t want Daisy finding out while she was nine months pregnant. So that night after Daisy fell asleep, she went back to the house to confront Chris. He told her that in her eyes he’d never be good enough for Dee, and she only felt that he was taking Dee away from her. He told Louise that she was obsessed with Dee, always with them, and it was her fault he went to Tyra. And now she’s blackmailing him because he broke it off with her to be with Dee and the baby. Louise told Chris he had to tell Dee or she would, and when he grabbed her to stop her from leaving the room she shoved him and he stumbled backwards, falling out of the window. It was not pre-meditated murder after all, and Louise tries to assure Daisy that she was just trying to defend her. By poisoning her all this time? Louise says Daisy was so sick she couldn’t take care of ‘our James’ … wait, our James?! Louise said Chris didn’t deserve him, but Daisy says that was not for her to decide. Louise said she panicked when the sheriff started sniffing around, and in Daisy’s state James would have been taken to a foster home, possibly enduring the same treatment the two of them had (Louise was unaware until later that Daisy had filed paperwork giving custody of James to her if anything happened to his mother). Louise said she did all of this for James because she is the only one who can give him the childhood he deserves. By killing his mother? Louise chuckles and tells Daisy that James will have the happy childhood they never had. But Daisy stops her in her tracks when she holds up her phone. She’s been on the line with 9-1-1 the whole time, Louise’s confession being recorded for the police. But Louise ain’t going quietly and she pulls out a knife and begins attacking Daisy, demanding to know where James is. Daisy runs into the attic room and tries to reason with Louise, asking her if James could have a happy childhood knowing his parents were murdered, but Louise says she’s doing it because she loves him. Daisy says the only way he can be happy is to be with his mom, because neither she nor Louise got to be with theirs. As the police arrive, Daisy manages to talk Louise down, getting her to drop the knife — which Daisy quickly sweeps out of reach — and embraces her, telling her it’s over and it’s going to be okay. Some time later, Daisy is leaving the house with James and the realtor, the house finally out of her life. Zack pulls up to give her a ride, and she tells him that while Chris made a lot of bad choices in his life, the best one he made was choosing Zack as his friend. (Did she forget Chris shunned him after learning Zack was in love with him? And did Chris know before that moment that Zack is gay? That’s a big unanswered question.) As they get in the car, Zack hands Daisy the bag of money before he forgets … and he really wanted to forget, he joked … and they drive off to her new, hopefully happier, life.

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A House Built on Lies really is a different kind of thriller than we’re used to getting from LMN, because while it seems to be a tawdry murder mystery with a lot twists and turns to the plot, in the end the whole story is really informed by the childhood trauma experienced by Daisy and Louise, and the ‘murder’ wasn’t really a murder. Louise did not go to Chris that night with the intention to kill him, and she only pushed him because he grabbed her, but she did not intend for him to go out the window. But did that moment cause her to snap? Or was it a combination of that and Daisy’s health issues that caused her to take over the mothering duties to the point that she was worried something would happen to Daisy and James would end up in the system? Perhaps if Daisy had told Louise sooner that she was the designated guardian, she wouldn’t have been so overly protective. There really is a lot of ambiguity to the situation, a lot of ‘what ifs’ to be considered, but in the end I don’t think Louise was intended to be a bad person, she just had a lot of trauma that had never been addressed. Perhaps Emily should have also reached out to her to make amends, but most of her ire had been directed at Daisy so she had to reach out to her first (although she knew the women were inseparable). I like that the story did not end with Daisy accidentally killing Louise — since they ended their showdown in the room where Chris died, I was sure Louise would somehow end up going through the window in the end. Instead, Daisy could empathize with Louise’s pain — their shared pain — and embraced her tightly, becoming a comfort even though she was still reeling from the facts surrounding Chris’ death and her own drugging. I wish there had been something in the coda of the story to tell us what charges Louise was going to face, and I wonder if Daisy would ever be able to forgive her. I am happy that she found an ally in Zack, and that he didn’t hold her accusations of murder against her. Zack was a good guy who just misjudged a situation (but did he really expect that Chris would have the same feelings for him, or was his admission of love just something he felt he needed to get off his chest?). It seemed that Chris may have been able to get past it after getting over the shock of finding out his best friend was in love with him. Maybe. But writers Patrick Ireland and Jessica Romagnoli — in their first credited feature — have really done a spectacular job of building and building on the story, and even though it seems like it could have been pretty outlandish as each layer of this onion is peeled back, with almost ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ story beats, it still makes for a really good, engaging, gripping movie that keeps you on the edge of your seat — at one point I even thought perhaps Daisy was the killer — and you never feel that each plot point is done for cheap effect. I look forward to more work from them. Director Andrew Parkes (in his second feature after his impressive work on the slightly silly Mama’s Little Murderer) really gives this a cinematic feel with the lighting and camera work, drawing some impressive performances from the cast as well, never allowing anyone to overplay and give things away, but letting some of them give just enough to make us question them (case in point, Louise, who I only started to feel was a little shady about halfway through the story) … although having Nurse Tyra be so surly from the get-go was a questionable decision because we had no way of knowing why she was so mean to Daisy right from the start (although having her march into — and out of — the funeral like Alexis Carrington’s first appearance on Dynasty without knowing who she was was a nice touch). Parkes has proven that he can take a good script and make it better, while elevating a terrific script to something pretty amazing. Makes you wonder what he could do with a real budget and longer shooting schedule.

The cast is also excellent. Kimberly-Sue Murray is outstanding as Daisy, having to take the character on one incredible journey, from what she believes is a loving and stable relationship, to an emergency delivery, going through her physical and emotional pain realistically, authentically portraying Daisy’s malaise as she’s under the influence of the drugs to the point that I felt drugged watching her performance (also ably assisted by the director’s visual choices). The look on her face when it finally dawns on her that her best friend in the whole world, practically her sister, has been the one responsible for everything is perfection. And that the story allows her to not immediately fly off the handle to confront Louise also gives Murray a chance to show some empathy through her own trauma. When she embraces Louise at the end to comfort her, it is a heartbreaking moment made all the more emotional through her performance. You feel like these two are truly life-long friends. As Louise, Diana Salvatore is also excellent, always the friend Daisy needs, never once giving away her agenda in her performance until necessary. She does seem a little over-protective of James, but in Daisy’s state that seems the best course of action. But in those moments when she is trying to insist Daisy have her tea, Salvatore gives some subtle twitches in her face — seen through some expertly staged close-ups by Parkes — that really clue us in to the fact that she has, in fact, been drugging Daisy. Salvatore really conveys Louise’s unaddressed trauma in her final scenes as she tries to justify her actions to Daisy, and that really sets the movie apart from the standard LMN thriller. Together, Murray and Salvatore really feel like they do have a life-long relationship, and that helps make the ending all the more poignant.

Ian Kilburn only has a couple of scenes as Chris, first seeming like the perfect husband in the beginning, then not too happy to be called out by Louise at the end, but also showing his moments of happiness with Tyra as she relates the promises he made to her about the house and the money (and that money is another question that lingers — did he really promise to give it to her, or was she really blackmailing him?). In the end he was a guy who made some mistakes and tried to fix them, but he didn’t deserve to die. Ansh Pandey is also wonderful as Zack. He does his best to hide why he and Chris fell out, and when he admits the truth to Daisy, he does it matter-of-factly and he finally has that burden lifted from his shoulders (and let’s give credit again to the writers for not having Daisy completely over-react). But again, I’d still like to know if Zack was already openly gay or if this admission to Chris was also him coming out at the same time, which certainly may cause someone to react in a certain way though it really seemed like it was something Chris could have gotten over eventually had he lived. Kate Corbett is just a little over-the-top as Nurse Tyra, just a bit too angry upon her first appearance leaving us to wonder what crawled up her butt and why she was taking it out on Daisy. Even during her second scene, we still don’t know why she is making threats to call CPS, so there should have been some conversations with the director about slowly building her resentment to the moment Daisy catches on and confronts her. She does, however, manage to feel genuinely surprised when Daisy accuses her of murdering Chris. Mary Lewis is also very good as Mrs. Simpson, her first appearance at the memorial seeming a bit insincere, and then doing a nice job of making us wonder if she had drugged Daisy’s tea when she finally paid a visit to Emily’s home. She certainly may have had some motive for killing Chris, knowing (or assuming) he’d been intercepting her letters to Daisy, and the way that scene over tea is filmed really gives us pause, trying to consider why she would want Chris dead and what is she trying to get from Daisy. Lewis also does a nice job with delivering an emotional impact when she finally releases all the pain she herself had been feeling — and not dealing with — and finally acknowledges and apologizes. The writers also gave that a nice coda by not allowing Daisy to forgive her right in that moment, only doing so after she’d had time to process everything on the ride back to the house.

Again, I don’t know why viewers have reacted with such apathy toward this movie. The writing, directing and acting place everyone at the top of their games. Sure, there are a lot of unanswered questions, some ambiguity, some convenient plot points (and it was certainly a choice to use a bright yellow rain slicker instead of the traditional Black Hoodie for the suspect … because I could see Zack in a Black Hoodie more than a yellow slicker, but the slicker had to camouflage the bodies of the wearers so as not to make it obvious Tyra’s body was very different from Zack’s), but in the end this is a very different type of story, one built out of trauma than revenge for some misdeed. That truly sets A House Built on Lies apart from the standard LMN thrillers, and it should be appreciated.

A House Built on Lies has a run time of 1 hour 30 minutes, and is rated TV-14.