Lifetime
Lifetime’s latest ‘Sunday Night Thrills’ entry offers an unsettling storyline about invasion of privacy that may have you checking every nook and cranny of any rental you ever stay at … and perhaps even in your own home.
Somebody’s Watching Me begins innocently enough as a group of friends gather at a rental home for a bridal party. Except the bride-to-be, Angela, seems to be distracted after they return from a night of partying, her girlfriends teasing her about the handsome man who flirted with her and gave her his number. Angela’s bestie Lori is concerned she may be considering sleeping with the guy, and if that’s the case then is she really ready for marriage? Lori thinks the groom-to-be, James, is wonderful and all that but if Angela is really having thoughts about hooking up then she really needs to reconsider her life choices. That puts a bit of a damper on the evening, and Lori goes to bed. Later she hears some noise and goes to check it out and finds a very pensive Angela on the balcony. Did she or didn’t she leave the house to meet up with the stranger? Lori also doesn’t know that while she was sleeping, someone dressed head-to-toe in black, including a ninja mask (but not a hoodie?!) entered her room and pulled out a knife, but stopped short of doing any harm.
Lifetime
Sometime after that getaway, Lori begins getting manila envelopes in her mailbox — not mailed though and a great excuse to get a doorbell camera — with flash drives in them, and on the drives are security camera videos of her at the rental house, sleeping. Lori hasn’t spoken to Angela in months since she called off the wedding, and her communication with the others has been minimal, but she has to reach out to see if anyone else is getting these flash drives. One of the friends, Tanya, has not and Lori finally gets up the nerve to contact Angela, but she has not gotten anything either. Another envelope arrives and this video features the figure in black, and while the police had nothing to go on with the first video, the second one is more concerning. Lori talks to Angela, and she tells Lori that James handled the rental so he might have information on the rental agent or owner of the home, and she gives Lori her blessing to speak to him. The whole situation is still a bit awkward but Lori does go to James to see if he can help. He doesn’t have any info at first, and for some reason the house they stayed at is no longer listed on the rental site, but he remembers his chat with the renter and was able to pull that up and give Lori the phone number, which she calls but gets no reply. Things escalate when Lori gets more flash drives but now the videos are from inside her house, spooking her enough that she asks her mother to take her son for a few days until she can resolve the situation. Lori begins to spend more time with James, and as she feels the police aren’t moving fast enough, takes matters into her own hands to confront the rental agent, with James tagging along (unaware that Angela saw them leaving his frame store from across the street, a very unhappy look on her face). The agent says she signed an NDA to not talk about that property but there have been other complaints and maybe she could check out a house up the street and talk to the owner. Which Lori does, unaware that Detective Daniels has already been staking out that house, knowing the owner, Robert, has had some past criminal activity on his record. Lori confronts the man when he opens the front door and believes she has put an end to the torment, and she gets a call from the detective berating her for basically blowing up the case by confronting the suspect. Oops. Secure in her belief that she is now safe (ish), Lori plans to stay up all night just to make sure no one comes to the house, so she has a glass of wine … probably not the best move if you want to stay awake, girl. Coffee would have been a better option. But she gets drowsy and falls asleep, completely knocked out (was the wine drugged?) to the point she doesn’t hear the glass breaking that she placed on the door handle … and it does not dissuade the intruder either. This time, the intruder goes to Lori’s bedroom, places a teddy bear nanny cam on her dresser, pulls out the knife again and this time makes a tiny cut on her arm, which she still sleeps through! James comes to the house and calls Lori, but she’s not answering, and he does not see the intruder running through the house and out the back. James thinks that maybe the situation with Lori has gotten really awkward for her since he insisted on spending the night, on the couch, to make sure she was safe but she ended up on the couch with him … and we can only imagine what happened after that.
Lori is totally freaked out when she gets a new video of that night, and she decides that she needs to vacate the house until the police can catch the guy, so she leaves her son, Eric, with mom Frances and goes to a motel outside of town, telling her mother to call the hotel if she needs her (because the intruder took her phone for some reason), and telling the motel clerk that if anyone but her mother calls, she’s not there. But later, Lori hears through her fog of sleep someone yelling her name, and it’s Frances, frantic that Lori’s son Eric has been taken. (Apparently the desk clerk was not picking up the phone.) It’s about an hour’s drive back to town and Lori calls James to tell him what happened and to meet at Robert’s house. When they get there, it appears no one is home and calling for Eric gets no response. James finally finds the boy unconscious in the shower, and when Robert appears, he and James get into a knock down, drag out fight, with Robert going over the balcony railing and onto the rocks below. With Robert dead, Lori can get her life back on track, but she’s been avoiding calls from both James and Angela, though she finally agrees to meet up with James for dinner. Things seem fine, and when Lori goes to the rest room, she checks her phone and there is a call from Angela. She finally feels the need to tell Lori all about that night at the rental, admitting she did cheat on James and how bad she felt after sleeping with the guy but … James was there too. He’d been spying on her, and he was a completely different person than who she thought James was and that was why she ended things right there. Now she feels guilty about sending Lori to James to help her and warns her to be careful. As Madeline Ashton would say, ‘Now a warning?!’ That makes the rest of the date a bit awkward, and when they get back to Lori’s house, she makes all kinds of excuses to not let James into the house. But it’s not long before the complete truth is revealed and Lori’s nightmare isn’t as over as she thought it was.
Lifetime
Somebody’s Watching Me, written by Shannon Latimer (Behind Closed Doors), is a pretty solid thriller, even though it hinges on a simple truth that could have made the whole situation avoidable. But the whole scenario is constructed well enough that we don’t ever really know if Angela slept with the other guy until James tells Lori what happened, leaving her, and us, to assume he ended the engagement. The mystery of the intruder is also a nice misdirection, and I was never really sure who the person in black actually was, and the way things are constructed, I never thought James was involved and while playing junior detective, I even considered Angela, and even Frances, as suspects believing Robert was a total red herring. (While there is no Black Hoodie in this movie, there is a shot of someone sitting at a computer viewing and editing the security camera footage who is wearing a hood — inside the house, obviously to hide the hair from the viewer and not give away the identity of the culprit too soon.) So kudos to Latimer for spinning this web that did have a rather surprising outcome. Now, as I mentioned, this all could have been avoided if Angela had simply admitted to Lori what happened that night at the house instead of waiting days or weeks later after she told Lori it was okay to reach out to James. Angela knew he was spying on her at the house, and while she didn’t know about the cameras, she should have been concerned at that moment when Lori told her about the videos she’d been receiving. And why did Angela cut herself off from her friends? Lori certainly would have been there for her. Of course, we would have had a very different movie — or no movie at all — if Angela had done the sensible thing in the first place. Director Philippe Gagnon has also done a great job at keeping the entire mystery under wraps, guiding the actors so that no one ever gives away the game, keeping you guessing until the big reveal. The whole plot with Robert as the patsy is actually pretty complicated but Latimer and Gagnon have crafted it so well that you don’t find it entirely implausible.
As usual, Kirsten Comerford does an excellent job as Lori. At the rental, she is truly Angela’s friend, really trying to talk her out of making a terrible mistake — on both counts, cheating and marriage. She only wants what’s best for her friend. She also shows us that Lori is driven, often putting her work — and a promotion — ahead of her home life, missing her son’s sporting events, but she is also fiercely protective of her family and isn’t afraid to take matters into her own hands when necessary. Comerford makes Lori someone we, as the audience, can relate to and would want as a friend … and someone we would also be protective of if she needed it. It was fun to see Jayne Heitmeyer again as her mother, after Relative Danger and The Body in the Locker, Lori’s main support system, taking care of Eric, and keeping things afloat while Lori is constantly pulled away by her job.
Lifetime
Jesse Collin gives a really great performance as James. We don’t meet him until after Lori starts getting the flash drives, and he really makes James seem like a nice guy, still hurting from the cancellation of the wedding but willing to help Lori, seeming to be completely concerned about the situation. It’s he who reveals to Lori — who doesn’t want to talk trash about her friend — about the cheating, but it just seems like it’s something that happened and he has to get over it and move on. His feelings for Lori are subtle at first, and he’s completely understanding that she believes it would be totally awkward if things progressed, and when they do he also seems fine that she wants to pump the brakes. He really seems like the best guy in the world, and you’d never know through Collin’s performance that James is hiding a secret (and in the end we have to wonder if he truly was attracted to Lori, or if it was all a ruse to gain her confidence so he could exact his misguided revenge, blaming her for ‘egging on’ Angela to cheat on him, when she did the opposite). Rachel Sellan has the smaller role as Angela, and she really makes her reunion with Lori feel as awkward as it probably would have been in real life. It’s nice that they finally do reconnect but … if my friend had been holding back some major information that put my life in danger, I don’t think there would be any coming back from that.
Overall, Somebody’s Watching Me has a really well-constructed narrative that never betrays its outcome by dropping obvious hints to the viewer as to who is actually the culprit. There are a few story points that are plot devices just to be plot devices that you perhaps don’t think about until later, so they don’t take anything away from the experience while you watch the movie. It’s all aided by great direction and an excellent cast headed by Comerford and Collin, making it very watchable, allowing you to play along to try and figure out how it’s all going to end.
Somebody’s Watching Me has a run time of 1 hour 27 minutes, and is rated TV-14.