Movie Review :: Lifetime’s My Husband’s Other Wife

Lifetime

Lifetime’s latest ‘Sunday Night Thrills’ movie is a real nail-biter, but you have to completely overlook the gigantic plot hole which is the basic crux of the story. If you can ignore the legal facts of the matter, this is a good one.

My Husband’s Other Wife stars Christie Leverette and Christopher Sky as apparently happily married couple Kelli and Ty Dawson. Ty has a great job that affords them and their children, Luke and Emma, a lovely home while Kelli only needs to maintain a part-time job. Ty’s job, however, requires him to leave town for a week on a regular basis but Kelli accepts that as part of their lives. During one of Ty’s trips, Kelli is hanging out with her bestie Maddy, who somehow gets an alert on her phone about someone’s social media account and the pictures she sees are shocking — Ty with another woman, as if the two were a couple. Kelli is devastated and furious, and when Ty returns home she confronts him with the pictures, forcing him to admit that he is not just having an affair, but he is married to the woman in the pictures, Sasha. While he tries to explain that Sasha is perfectly fine with his marriage to Kelli, Kelli is most definitely not okay with his marriage to Sasha and she kicks him out of the house. He goes right back to Sasha — she is in South Carolina while Kelly is in Georgia — but he’s too aggravated and upset so he leaves her to go back to Kelli. But Kelli is informed that there has been an accident and Ty is dead, having apparently lost control of his car, crashing head first into a tree and being almost totally consumed by the fire that came after the crash. Kelli is devastated and has to tell her children that daddy is not coming home, and it isn’t long after that she is notified that her house is being put on the market … by Sasha. Ty had a new will drawn up that supersedes the will he originally had with Kelli as the beneficiary, and he has left everything to Sasha including the house. Maddy offers Kelli a place for her and the kids to stay while she sorts things out, but Kelli isn’t taking this lying down.

After a spicy encounter with sassy realtor Ronald, Kelli drives herself a hundred miles to Sasha’a house to let her know in no uncertain terms that she is not taking her children’s home from them. But the confrontation gets a little heated and suddenly there is a crowd of neighbors all with their phones out recording the dispute. Sasha goes back in her house and Kelli follows, but Sasha pretends that she is being assaulted for the benefit of the nosy neighbors and it’s not long before the police arrive to settle things down. Kelli had previously removed all of the family photos from the walls of her house, but when she returns they are all back up, and daughter Emma swears that she saw her daddy waving to her from the sidewalk across the street from her school. Brother Luke is upset that Kelli is indulging Emma’s fantasies, and things get even more complicated when someone from Child Protective Services calls Kelli to notify her that they will be making a visit to assess the welfare of the children. Kelli is certain Sasha is behind this, and after she and Maddy get the house in order, the CPS officer arrives early the next day to catch Kelli off guard as she and the kids arrive home … only to find the kitchen a complete disaster area. Kelli assures the woman it was not like that when she left, and the officer suspects there is some revenge plot in motion here but she still has to document what she sees, including the open bottle of pills laying on the counter, which Kelli insists are not hers (and Sasha has proof that she was at work so the distance would have been impossible for her to cover in the short time between Kelli leaving and returning to the house). With the police still unable to properly identify the burned body in Ty’s car, Kelli remembers that Sasha works at a dental office so perhaps she had something to do with switching the dental records and had prescribed the pills to use as a plant. Maddy takes it upon herself to drive to South Carolina and pose as a patient at the office to look for Ty’s dental records, but Sasha recognizes the name on the forms and is sure she is up to something. Maddy does get photos of the X-rays and flees before Sasha can inflict any pain on her mouth, but she never returns back to her house. Instead, Kelli gets a text telling her to meet Maddy at a specific location because she has the evidence. Kelli goes but does not find Maddy. Instead she is confronted by someone else, which leaves her trapped in a pit with no apparent way out. Will Kelli be able to free herself, protect her children and prove that what she’s been telling the police about Sasha all along was true?

Lifetime

My Husband’s Other Wife is quite an accomplished thriller, keeping you on the edge of your seat for the duration, chewing your nails down to the nub as Kelli’s situation grows more dire by the minute. But there is that massive plot hole that may bug some viewers, and that is the fact that once the authorities know Ty was in a bigamist marriage with Sasha, his second wife had absolutely zero legal claims to Kelli’s property. Bigamy is illegal in the United States, so any wills or legal documents Ty had with Sasha would have been null and void, she would have not had any rights to sell Kelli’s house out from under her. It’s such a major plot point that it’s shocking that anyone would give it the okay to use since it’s one of the most illogical storylines I think I’ve ever seen in a Lifetime movie … and there have been some doozies but since this one is so grounded in the law, it’s mindboggling that anyone thought it would make for a logical storyline. That being said, while the concept is flawed the execution is handled extremely well by director Lisa France, building up the tension from scene to scene, never allowing it to devolve into soap opera territory with Kelli and Sasha resorting to a big catfight at any point. It just all builds to the big reveal — that we all knew was coming but it still works — that will keep your nerves on edge.

The implausibility of the storyline — I mean, Kelli’s lawyer could have quickly squashed this whole thing by proving Ty’s bigamy with a comparison of the marriage licenses and the dates on them — is easy to overlook thanks to the expert performances of the cast. Christopher Sky does a nice job of showing his relationship with Kelli is all fine and dandy, and then he goes into complete ‘man mode’ when he tries to justify his actions of wanting the best of both worlds. Christie Leverette is outstanding as the wronged woman whose trust is broken by the man she loved, fiercely trying to protect her children while trying not to completely emotionally unravel. Leverette has to bring a heightened nervous tension to the role while remaining calm at the same time, doing an excellent job balancing everything so that she doesn’t come off as totally hysterical. Kennie Nicole Jenkins is also terrific as Sasha, confident and assured in her relationship with Ty, not shy to throw it in Kelli’s face, jabbing at her with her words that Ty was more comfortable and open with her than he was with Kelli, using more subtle and insidious measure to make Kelli crack rather than outwardly losing control of her emotions. Great performances here by both actresses.

Lifetime

Ashton Leigh offers nice support as Maddy, making her the friend anyone would want to have, willing to go completely out of her way to help. She gives Maddy compassion and resolve, and she becomes quite giddy when she thinks she pulled off that heist at the dentist’s office. She’s so good that you can’t help feel a sense of loss when it appears something terrible may have happened to her. AJ Bernard and Kendi Nichols are wonderful as Luke and Emma, with Bernard bringing a nice sense of maturity to his role while Nichols is the complete innocent, taking everything at face value but being very upset that no one believes she saw and talks to her daddy. John Castle puts in an appearance as Detective Cole, showing some level of compassion to Kelli yet unwilling to take anything she says at face value, assuring her he will apologize if need be. Brent Black is a bit over-the-top as realtor Ronald, always making it seem like he is in complete cahoots with Sasha, always giving Kelli a smug attitude instead of behaving like someone caught in the middle of something he should not be in the middle of. Gregory M. Mitchell is also good as Kelli’s attorney Winston Knox, giving a calm and measured performance, but he’s let down by the writing that makes it seem as if he is a lawyer who does not know the law. Telling Kelli that the second will is totally legal is absurd, but he has to say the lines he was given and he does so with enough authority so as to not make you question if he’s absolutely wrong about that.

So that makes My Husband’s Other Wife — and finally a Lifetime movie with the most accurate title ever — a bit of a conundrum. It’s legal hogwash, but it’s still a tense thriller with great performances that works overtime to not make you think about it too hard. If you can drive past that huge plot hole, this is a really enjoyable thriller.

My Husband’s Other Wife has a run time of 1 hour 27 minutes, and is rated TV-14.