Movie Review :: Lifetime Network’s Murder at the Merriweather

Lifetime

Business, pleasure and long lost friendships do not go hand-in-hand in Lifetime’s latest ‘Sunday Night Thrills’ movie, Murder at the Merriweather.

Haley Lohrli and Margo Parker star as besties Sophie and Rena, respectively, employees at a fancy-schmancy inn called The Merriweather — although it’s more antique than posh, but it seems to be the place to go for a vacation or special event. One such occasion is about to take place at The Merriweather — a wedding, and it just so happens the lucky couple is Rena’s ex-boyfriend, Sam, and the girl he cheated with, Kelly, who used to be besties with both girls as well. Naturally, when you break the girl code and screw your friend’s boyfriend, you get ejected from the group (and torn out of pictures, as can be glimpsed in Sophie’s locker at the inn). Sophie isn’t thrilled these people are going to be there, but Rena assures her all will be well and she’s fine. And when Sam and his weird brother Jasper arrive, the girls are invited to party with them that night after work, before the bride-to-be arrives the next day. And party they do — in dresses borrowed from, apparently, Kelly’s wardrobe which has arrived ahead of her — with Sophie getting black-out drunk and left in the hallway. When she comes to, she can’t find Rena anywhere but when she does, it’s not good. Rena appears to have jumped from a second floor balcony — the bride’s room, in fact — and suffered fatal head trauma, putting a real damper on the impending nuptials. And Kelly’s arrival soon after the discovery, apparently unaware of the tragedy, doesn’t help Sophie’s mood but when she does find out about Rena, Kelly is also very upset. Sophie’s manager, Alec, doesn’t help matters at all, being completely insensitive to her feelings but at least he gives her the rest of the day off. Sophie is especially distraught because the police, after a cursory investigation and a closed case after less than a day (so as not to alert the tourists about the tragedy and scare them off) have determined that Rena committed suicide, and the crooked sheriff has a prescription to ‘prove’ Rena was taking medication for depression. This is all news to Sophie as she and Rena had plans to leave the inn at the end of the Summer and head to Los Angeles so Sophie could pursue her journalism career. Rena was excited about the move so Sophie needs to get to the bottom of things. And she finds an unexpected ally in Kelly who, it seems, will do anything to avoid her overbearing mother-in-law to be, Tamara.

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The girls begin to do some digging, but at every turn it seems Alec, Jasper or Tamara step in their way. Sophie begins to believe Sam killed Rena after she goes into his room and finds Rena’s phone under his bed, along with a broken lightbulb. One of the guests, Doctor Osborne, also keeps bugging Sophie about something missing from his room, and the only person who could have taken it had to have a key, meaning it was one of the inn’s employees. But he won’t ever tell Sophie what the item is so she has no idea how to help him. As she and Kelly begin to dig deeper, it seems Alec may be the culprit because he’s creepy and has his own weird little room at the top of the inn. Taking his key card, the girls go to the room and find some Polaroids that were taken the night Rena died during the bachelor party in Sam’s room. Sophie also manages to unlock Rena’s phone, believing the password has something to do with Rena’s dog Fuzzball (which Kelly corrects as Snowball, because of course she remembers her friend’s dog’s name … while Sophie does not), and finds a text that went unsent that really seems to indicate Rena did jump off the balcony. There is also a ‘goodbye cruel world’ note allegedly written by Rena found in Alec’s room. But none of this adds up for Sophie, and she is certain that with all the security cameras around the place, one of them must have captured something, so she then breaks into Alec’s laptop to see the footage but … it’s all been deleted, except for one outdoor camera that captured Rena falling to the ground. Sophie remembers someone was mopping up the blood and asks Alec who was on duty that day, and it was maid Dasha (who is forced to wear a ridiculous Downton Abbey-style maid uniform). Sophie and Kelly approach her to see if she knows anything, and Dasha says she will talk to Sophie after her shift. At this point, Jasper is growing more and more unhinged (he wasn’t exactly hinged from the beginning), and after Alec fires Sophie for accessing his computer, she never leaves the premises so the police have to get involved and a chase ensues through the inn, with Kelly — who also used to work there — remembering some secret passages, notably a door in the floor that leads to their old drinking spot under the building. Kelly has to get back inside and prepare for a welcome dinner for the guests, and Sophie decides to wait an hour for Dasha but she is attacked and rendered unconscious. When she awakens, Dasha is there … dead, hit in the head with a lamp. The sheriff arrests Sophie, but discovers her story about being knocked out was true as she had traces of a drug in her system, so she’s off the hook. Sam comes to pick her up but she turns down his offer for a ride until he tells her he will give her the whole story of what happened the night Rena died. Which he apparently doesn’t do until they pull up in the inn’s driveway. But he drops a major bomb — he did, in fact, have sex with Rena, and Sophie is shown a message Rena sent on social media saying ‘I stole him back’ with a picture of her in bed with Sam. This rocks Sophie’s world, and when she exits Sam’s car she finds the doctor’s missing item under the floor mat — his prescription pad. Did Sam take the pad and fake Rena’s depression medication to deflect from his guilt? He proclaims his innocence, but it just gets him arrested and confirms Rena was not suicidal, so it seems someone did murder her.

So who else saw the message and could have killed Rena? Was it Alec, to protect the inn’s reputation? Sam, to protect his reputation? Tamara, to make sure nothing interfered with the wedding she’s spent buckets of money on? Doctor Osborne, because Rena had some dirt on him and the illicit drugs he’s handing out to everyone? Did Kelly see the message and somehow arrive at the inn the night before unnoticed and only staged her arrival the next morning? Or was it really an accident after all? One thing is for sure, Sophie is in for a big surprise when the truth is revealed.

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Murder at the Merriweather is a decent mystery-thriller with a cast of characters no one would have sympathy for except Sophie. The screenplay by Alyssa Kramer and Troup Wood does a nice job of building the mystery of Rena’s death, while giving us a whole list of suspicious characters who may have had various reasons for wanting her dead. For some reason, the character who comes in hardest is Jasper, somehow Sam’s brother but the most entitled and a real mama’s boy. In short, he’s just a nasty piece of work. Sam seems okay at first, happy to see his old classmates and looking forward to getting married, but then he turns out to be a real slimeball. Inn manager Alec is just as unpleasant as Jasper, with an insincere smile always planted on his face, and just a bit too handsy with Sophie (he’s not gay?!). Tamara is also an entitled white woman who believes the world should bow down to her, and she dotes on Jasper but not Sam, and she’s trying to control the wedding plans because she’s paying for it. Kelly is harder to read. She seems happy to see Sophie and sad about Rena, but sometimes she seems to be hiding something and others she’s gung ho to help Sophie catch Rena’s killer. The Sheriff is useless, corrupt and working more for whoever is funding his election campaign than for the good of the community. Sophie, of course, is in the clear, as are Dasha and cook Phil (who seems to be on duty 24 hours a day). So there are plenty of suspects present and all of them act shady enough to be guilty. Director Danny J. Boyle does a good job of keeping the mystery hidden until the big reveal (but I did have my suspicions early on who it was and I was proven correct). The location selected for the Merriweather is some weird, dated mansion, and you can practically smell the mustiness through the TV screen. It seems to be an odd place for some 20-somethings to want to have their wedding (unless mother decreed that would be the location). The only thing that really felt weird was the Dasha character. Why does she have to wear that ridiculous uniform when no one else is in crazy period uniforms? For a long time, I thought perhaps she was a ghost, in the vein of the maid in Season 5 of American Horror Story (‘Hotel’) that only Sophie and Rena could see. In the end, it all works pretty well and it should keep you guessing.

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It’s nice to see a group of actors who we haven’t seen over and over in a Lifetime movie. Haley Lohrli is very good as Sophie, the real straight-and-narrow girl who has her goals in sight and tries to keep Rena in check, although she does give in a little too easily under Rena’s influence but it’s probably because she knows she has to keep an eye on her friend. Lohrli really allows the viewer to sympathize with Sophie, and that is extremely important as she is the only character we can sympathize with. Margo Parker’s Rena is a total break-all-the-rules party girl, but she’s also carrying that animosity from their high school years after Sam cheated on her with Kelly. She is very excited to party with him and the other guys, but she never lets on to Sophie that she’s going in with an agenda. Unfortunately it got her dead.

John Ryan McLaughlin makes Alec a total creep and control freak, someone who can’t stand anyone getting one up on him. He doesn’t seem to be able to attend to a guest’s needs without a touch of condescension in his voice (and on his face with his always fake smile), and McLaughlin does a great job of making your skin crawl every time Alec is on screen. James Chrosniak, just seen a day earlier in Murder in the Dark, shows his range between the two movies. In the first he was an apparently good cop with a lot of empathy with the blind witness to a murder. Here he’s just completely mentally unbalanced and controlling, the kind of person that only a mother could love. He just makes everyone around him uncomfortable with his unpleasantness. Carson Polish is also good as Sam, a guy who knows he comes from a place of privilege but doesn’t flaunt it like the rest of his family. He makes Sam seem genuine with his love for Kelly (even though he couldn’t keep his pants zipped with his ex) and truly happy to see Sophie. He’s just the poor schlub who gets caught up in some bad situations, and while he’s not blameless for the situation, he isn’t ultimately a bad guy, just a jerk.

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Taylor Anne Danehower has a bit of a complicated role to play as Kelly. When she arrives at the hotel she’s all smiles at seeing her old friend and co-worker Sophie, and also very emotional when she learns about Rena. She seems desperate to re-establish the friendship with Sophie, especially now, while not really taking any accountability for why the friendship between the three of them ended. But perhaps all of the help she’s giving Sophie is her way of making amends, because at one point she tells Sophie she’s the only friend she has. She also makes it seem that Kelly does love Sam and is at the end of her rope with Tamara, while being creeped out by Jasper and Alec. But is she totally innocent? Danehower never shows her cards through her performance. Nancy Harding is the total embodiment of ‘white privilege’’ and she makes Tamara the one you love to hate. It’s clear where Jasper gets his attitude from, and whatever bad things happen to her in the end is well deserved. Scott Striegel doesn’t have much to do except to keep berating Sophie about the missing object from his room because she seems to be the only person actually working at the inn (Alec does keep reminding Sophie they are short-staffed, especially with Rena no longer employed for obvious reasons … and then he fires Sophie, leaving Dasha and Phil as the only other employees on duty?!). Edina Loskay gives Dasha a very odd presence, especially because of that crazy maid’s outfit, but she really does play Dasha as if she is a ghost. I was shocked when Kelly could see her, and even more shocked when she ended up dead, proving she wasn’t a ghost (but now she’ll haunt The Merriweather forever, just like the ‘Hotel’ maid). Smeet Doshi brings humor to his role as cook Phil, but does the poor guy ever have a day off? He’s working during the day, he’s filling room service orders at 3 AM, he’s baking pastries early in the morning … Phil needs a break!). Peter Zizzo plays corrupt Sheriff West, obviously on the take and doing the bidding of whoever is paying him and it’s quite a surprise when he actually arrests Sam, especially when Jasper already made sure West knew his family would be contributing heavily to his upcoming campaign.

In the end, Murder at the Merriweather is actually better than it has any right to be, with a taut mystery that is never really given away by any of the performances, a cast of skilled actors who really embody their roles, and a resolution that actually comes as a bit of a surprise. It’s a good watch.

Murder at the Merriweather has a run time of 1 hour 27 minutes, and is rated TV-14.