Lifetime
Another Saturday night, another ‘Ripped from the Headlines’ movie courtesy of the Lifetime network, which alerts us at the start of the movie that while this is based on a true story the rest of the movie is an entire work of fiction. It would be interesting if Lifetime actually provided viewers with some type of reference to back up the film, but this really could be any account of someone being stalked. The whole DM thing (and for anyone not up on their social media jargon, that means Direct Messages) could, as the opening text states, simply be a plot device to tell this story. Unfortunately, it all falls into the land of cliché with some frustrating plot elements that have become completely stereotypical at this point.
He Slid Into Her DMs is centered around a high school student, Berni, who apparently attends La Mesa Junior High School, according to an establishing shot early in the movie, and is preparing for prom and college. It’s all very confusing from the beginning. Berni is an ‘influencer’, doing make-up tutorials on her social media platform and pursuing deals with major companies. She, in fact, has a major sponsorship deal for which she has to shoot some video of her boyfriend Zak’s ‘promposal’ … even though it’s already a given they’re going to the prom (even though he’s never formally asked). Berni has two friends, Jaz and Hana, but there is obviously something brewing especially with Hana, who seems particularly jealous of Berni’s followers and brand deals. Hana has her own online presence but with a fraction of the followers Berni has. Berni doesn’t seem to be able to see it, but even Helen Keller could see that Hana is just waiting for the right moment to knock Berni down a notch or three.
The chance comes when Berni starts getting DMs from a fan named Mason. The communications seem innocent enough but things escalate when Mason begins to ask for exclusive pictures that he’s willing to pay for. Berni isn’t sure about that but after consulting with her ‘momager’ Leah, she decides it’s a good way to make some extra coin as long as she doesn’t get too provocative. Berni also discovers her mom’s salon is on the verge of shutting down because of overdue payments, so Mason makes her an offer for a more risqué photo for bigger bucks (it’s never explained where he’s getting all of this money) and Berni complies, sending another photo with more cleavage and her face covered (still nothing obscene). At Zak’s big basketball game, someone in the crowd yells ‘BRICK’ just as he’s about to make a free-throw, causing him to miss the shot. After the game, Berni gets a slew of messages from Mason indicating he was the individual who yelled, and the next thing Berni knows he is standing behind her. He becomes a bit more aggressive, but she gets away unaware that Hana was in the shadows filming the entire encounter on her phone. Hana approaches Mason and suggests the two may have something in common.
Berni and Zak’s relationship begins to stumble a bit and Hana takes the opportunity to snap a photo with him in her car, tagging Berni on social media so she’s sure to see it. As if things couldn’t get worse, a knock comes on the door at her house and — without checking the peephole — Berni opens the door and Mason is standing right there with a bouquet of roses. Trying to get rid of him before her mother hears anything, she gets the door closed but Mason begins pounding on it again. When Berni opens the door she finds a gun pointed at her face. Mason invites himself in, and Leah comes to see what the commotion is. Mason threatens to kill Berni but Leah manages to talk him down just long enough to get his guard down and bash him in the head with a crystal vase. She hides Berni under a kitchen counter and disappears, but Mason wakes up and finds Berni who is trying to call the police. Leah reappears, a fight ensues, the gun is dropped and Leah manages to shoot Mason dead. And instead of being honest about what happens, constructs a web of lies that begin to make zero sense. But Berni doesn’t know yet that with a friend like Hana, she needs no enemies.
This is where the story just goes off the rails. Berni could have just been honest from the beginning about Mason, admitting she’d been chatting with him and sending him photos. She denied to the police and the media and her followers that she’d ever met Mason. Why? It would have made much more sense to say he stalked her at school and then somehow found her home address (thanks Hana) and tried to harm her there. But no, her mom tells her to deny everything, go on social media and do whatever she can to garner sympathy. Also, why smash Mason’s phone? Like his mother says when she shows up at the prom, do they not know about the ‘cloud’? It all begins to unravel and the police take notice that stories aren’t adding up. We’ve seen all of this before, many times. Yes, movies need to cook up drama to sustain a certain running time, but perhaps not offing Mason Janet Leigh-style in Psycho so early in the film would have at least made things more tense and dramatic as a stalker story. Now it’s just a story in which you want to shake these women and ask what the hell they were thinking.
Besides the ridiculous plot points, there is also an issue with casting. Not that Stella Gregg isn’t fine as Berni, but — no offense — she looks less like a 17-year-old high schooler than Olivia Newton-John did in Grease, and she was 29! Gregg is 23. She doesn’t act or look like a 17-year-old. Sierra Fujita also does not look like a teen. Why not just make this a story about college-age young adults? Berni could have still lived at home with her mother as a college student, or Courtney Thorne-Smith could have played a sympathetic professor or counselor, since she got an executive producer credit and had to be in the movie. There were just so many ways they could have written the story to make it feel a bit more authentic and frightening. As it stands it’s just another by-the-numbers drama that’s low on thrills. Director Alicia Coppola — no relation to the other Coppola movie-making family — is best known for her acting gigs on shows like Jericho, Why Women Kill and Empire, and she does a fine job of making the best of the script she was given (she also cast her husband Anthony Michael Jones in the role of the police officer assigned to the case). But the casting and the script just makes this one of those TV movies you need to watch with a room full of people to make it a lot more fun.
He Slid Into Her DMs has a run time of 1 hour 26 minutes, and is rated TV-14 for violence and intense sequences.
Lifetime
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