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Lifetime and its sister channel, Lifetime Movie Network, are infamous for their crime thrillers with bonkers titles that have no connection to the actual movie. Case in point, the last LMN movie starring Brianna Cohen, A Home to Die For, in which no one was killing or dying over the possession of a home. This latest LMN movie also stars Cohen but the title is succinct and accurate because her character does have a boyfriend who has a wife who ends up dead in the first 20 minutes. So kudos to whoever came up with the title My Boyfriend’s Wife is Dead. There is more to that story though.
Cohen plays Lena, a woman going through a divorce from her addict husband. Lena has a daughter, Madison, in high school and her own at-home candle making company, and she’s landed a meeting with Dean and Iris, who own a chain of swanky hotels, to pitch her products to have them placed in the rooms of their hotels (it’s not clear how Lena is going to produce a vast quantity of items if she works out of her basement). The couple is enthralled with Lena and her products and agree to place them in a few locations as a test run, and out of the blue Lena’s soon-to-be ex Paul shows up in the restaurant in a rage (drugs or alcohol related), embarrassing Lena and making her certain she’s just lost the deal. But Dean and Iris don’t blame her at all, and just bluntly ask if she’d like to join their relationship. Is this the first ‘throuple’ movie for LMN? It doesn’t take long for Lena to say yes, deciding to release her wild side after so many years of marriage. She hangs out with Iris a lot, and it’s not long before they’re having more than just dinner and drinks (off camera because even that’s too much for LMN). Lena tells her friend Kathy, who is staying at Lena’s house with Madison, that it’s late and she’s spending the night at the hotel but she’s really camped out at Dean and Iris’ house. Sometime in the wee hours of the morning after 2:00 AM, Iris is wandering around the kitchen where she finds a note from Dean saying he had to go to the hotel because of an emergency. Next thing she knows — well, the last thing she knows — is that someone violently smacked her in the head with a cast iron frying pan. Lena wakes up later and finds Iris in a pool of blood on the floor.
It’s not long before Lena and her relationship become public, with Lena becoming the main suspect in the murder especially as she begins spending more and more time with Dean. Luckily Dean’s housekeeper Betty is arrested and charged with the murder — Lena saw her and Iris having an argument the night before the murder, and Dean said they were firing Betty for her recent carelessness — but that does not take the heat off of Lena, even making her own home unsafe. Dean offers to let Lena and Madison live with him while he has a security system installed in their house, but wouldn’t you know it, there are other issues as like, like a leak in the roof that needs to be fixed which requires them to stay with Dean for weeks instead of days (and in the real world, no one would have to vacate their home for any amount of time to have security installed or have a roof repaired). Lena is just fine with that, but Madison, her boyfriend Jacob, and Kathy all think Lena is being influenced by Dean. Madison even calls her father in rehab to tell him what’s going on and he offers to do some digging, while Madison and Jacob also snoop around the house. Unfortunately, they all uncover some evidence that points to Dean not being a good guy, and even though housekeeper Betty is convicted and given a life sentence, it becomes clear everyone’s life is in danger once secrets are spilled. But who will survive?
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My Boyfriend’s Wife is Dead is an okay thriller but if you can’t figure out who killed Iris the second that frying pan hits her in the head, you haven’t seen many of these movies. Senior citizen Betty certain would not have the strength to lift that pan high enough to hit Iris in the head with the shockingly violent force depicted. And of course it’s not going to be Lena either as she has zero motive. Certainly isn’t Paul because he’s in rehab and wouldn’t know where Dean and Iris lived unless he’d been following Lena, but he’d be more likely to want to kill Dean. There is a dearth of suspects so the movie is really just 90 minutes of us waiting for everyone to put all the pieces together while Lena ignores all of Dean’s odd behavior. Rachel Morton really doesn’t make Lena the smart cookie she should be, having her immediately fall under Dean’s, and Iris’, spell without a moment’s hesitation. Then she doesn’t question why it would take weeks to have a security system installed? And she didn’t know her roof was leaking? (And why did the security people have to be on the roof in the first place?) Lena is written as just too easily manipulated, and it sort of insults the intelligence of the audience. And since we all know who killed Iris, it’s just a long, drawn out story as we wait for the characters to catch up. Had there been more of a set-up, more potential (actual) suspects than Betty — a business partner, a jealous former lover (oh, wait, there is one of those but he shows up for a hot second late in the story and attacks Lena for no good reason and we never see him again), anyone else associated with Iris — it would have made for a more gripping whodunit. Since we know whodunit, we spend the rest of the time being frustrated by Lena seeing the situation through rose-colored glasses. Even when Dean offers to pay for Madison’s college tuition, Lena thinks that’s wonderful while Madison finds it creepy (smart girl … but even Jacob thinks she should accept but perhaps he’s just looking at this as opportunistic). And then it takes just one phone call from her ex to open Lena’s eyes? It’s just not the best constructed story. On the plus side, the film is well directed by Bruno Hernández and Damián Romay (not sure why it took two people to direct it though), the production design opulent — although Lena’s house may be a bit too opulent if she says she has no money to pay for her own security system — and the lighting is very cinematic. It all looks great, it’s just let down by a rather pedestrian story.
Brianna Cohen, again, elevates her performance over the material, doing her darnedest to make it all feel logical, but she becomes a bit too sister-wifey cult member — even though she’s the only member of the cult after Iris dies — turning her back on Kathy and ignoring her daughter’s concerns about Dean and their whole situation. Some day, Lifetime will give Cohen a movie worthy of her talents. Donny Boaz does a good job as Dean, making him very seductive without being creepy, slowly turning controlling, manipulative and dangerous as the story progresses. He sells the distraught spouse very well which, if there had been more suspects, would have made him seem less guilty, his personality change being more surprising. But he does a good job with what he’s given to work with. Kylie Cunningham is very good as Madison, the one character whose head is firmly on her shoulders. She is always questioning Dean’s motives, she does not willingly trust anything he says or does, always feeling there is some ulterior motive behind his actions. She is the best-written character in the movie and Cunningham does a great job bringing her to life. Aiden Patrick Griffin does his best to portray a wide-eyed high school senior, but you really have to suspend disbelief because he looks like he’s already graduated college. (Good luck trying to find out his real age because it’s nowhere to be found online.) His performance as Jacob is good, he does his best to convince the viewer he’s a teenager but he just looks much older and it’s distracting (of course there is a long history of casting 20-30-something actors as teenager in movies and TV shows, but there are plenty of younger actors today who are teens that can act who could be cast in these roles). Neil Mulac is way over-the-top in his first scene, but actually gives a good performance as Paul later in the movie, much more level-headed and concerned for his family (and he oddly doesn’t look much older than Griffin). Jessica Pacheco is fine as Kathy, but she’s written to indulge Lena more than help her. Nicole Marie Johnson is also good as Iris in her brief time on screen, with a performance that makes it easy to see why Lena connects with her so quickly.
My Boyfriend’s Wife is Dead is a very mixed bag of a movie. The murder mystery plot is really non-existent, but the production looks more expensive than it probably was, and the performances are mostly excellent with the actors doing their best to elevate the material they were given. It’s certainly not as bad as The Wrong Marriage, and it might be just a step above Cohen’s last LMN movie. It’s not a complete waste of time, but it’s only worth your time if you have nothing better to do. At least the title makes sense.
My Boyfriend’s Wife is Dead has a run time of 1 hour 27 minutes, and is rated TV-14.