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Lifetime Movie Network begins its ‘Sizzling Summer Nights’ programming with a pretty decent mystery-thriller that will keep you guessing until the end, but perhaps reaches way too far for any of it to be really plausible. But this is pure escapism so plausibility isn’t really what anyone is going for here, right?
As with a lot of these LMN mysteries, Stranger With My Name begins almost at the end with a weird dinner scene the ends with a shocking discovery before flashing back to three days earlier. David and Alice Warren have just moved into their new home in a new town as Alice has gotten a new job thanks to, she believes, her college roomie Sydney. While preparing to attend a gathering of the company’s employees at Sydney’s house, Alice finds a box of letters with David’s name on them but he quickly takes them and tells her it’s just stuff he hadn’t thrown away. At the party, Alice meets a few of her new co-workers — Ellie, Beth, Jeremy — and thanks Sydney for putting in a good word for her but Sydney says she had nothing to do with her hiring, Alice got the job on her own merits. David, meanwhile, is very preoccupied with phone calls he claims are from a new client he’s working with and he needs to return home. Ellie offers to give Alice a ride home if she doesn’t want to leave yet and she accepts. As the party ends, Ellie and Alice begin the drive home but suddenly Ellie begins to speed up, driving recklessly around curves, telling Alice ‘it isn’t personal’ as she drives her car off the road, flipping it violently.
Alice wakes up in the hospital some time later but the doctor and nurses keep calling her Ellie. She insists her name is Alice Warren and demands her personal items so she can leave the hospital. All they have is her ID and her shattered phone. Even her wedding ring is missing, and when she looks at the driver’s license she sees her picture (a very, very old picture with a very, very different face that vaguely looks like her) and the name Ellie Mills. Catching a cab to take her home, she gets to the door but can’t get in. David answers but he has no idea who this woman is, and then his wife Alice comes to the door as well. Real Alice feels like she’s losing her mind, so the cab driver takes her back to the hospital but she doesn’t stay long, stealing a set of car keys — with the blessing of the woman in the room (telling Alice it’s her son-in-law’s car and she can scratch the hell out of it) — and she heads to the police station. Unfortunately, Detective Wiley can find no record of Alice Warren, and even worse there is no record of her daughter Chelsea. No one knows who Alice is anymore. She returns to the house and finds a key to get in, and while inside she finds an invoice from a company called Braeburn, which rings a bell because that was the name of David’s client. Alice runs into neighbor Carole, who does recognize her, and she lets Alice use her laptop to look up Braeburn, finding the woman posing as her on the employee list as well as … David. Alice suddenly gets dizzy and passes out, her tea drugged by Carole who then calls someone to tell them what is going on. It’s much later when Alice wakes up, but it seems Carole knows too much and gets her head tenderized, and Alice manages to knock down the killer, shocked to find Beth under the hood. But she tells Alice there’s more going on than she knows and hightails it away, so Alice can think of only one other person that can help her, Sydney, who has just returned from a company weekend retreat in Arizona and has no idea what’s going on. She agrees to help Alice put all the pieces together, discovering a massive embezzlement scheme and more dead bodies, but Alice gets the biggest shock when she finds out who is truly behind this crazy plan to erase her from existence.
Stranger With My Name is a pretty engrossing thriller that is sure to keep you on the edge of your seat … as long as you don’t see any of the artwork that advertises the movie. If it isn’t a completely ridiculous title that has nothing to do with the movie, or a title that accurately gives away the movie, LMN has a penchant for spoiling the mystery with who ends up featured on the artwork. As a viewer of these movies, I can generally figure out the whodunit early on, but I really was not sure what was going on in this movie … until I remembered the two people featured on the artwork — Alice and … the person who is gaslighting her (not David). So knowing who was involved is only part of the mystery, the reason for the gaslighting is another matter altogether. Without too many spoilers, the culprit is another woman — Ellie, Beth, Sydney. They all work for the same company so they have access to the computer system. The plot against Alice all boils down to revenge because she ended up with David 20 years ago and the other woman didn’t (perhaps that is a bit spoilery, sorry). The box of letters Alice found were from that woman, which helped Alice finally prove she wasn’t crazy. Where this story gets really crazy is the sheer scope of the plan that involved so many people playing along out of fear of this woman (in Carole’s case a deal seems to have been made to help her daughter get an organ transplant for her playing along). How so many people can be so scared of one person to do their bidding is a bit much. It’s not like she’s the President of the United States or anything. David has to play along to keep his daughter safe, but it’s never made clear why everyone else is so afraid of her. The one person who doesn’t seem to be in the loop is Jeremy, because he thinks someone else is embezzling the money from their company to Braeburn and he knows who Alice is. There really is a lot going on here to keep you, the viewer, as off-balance as Alice but if you think too hard about any of it you realize this will require a complete suspension of disbelief.
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Even though it is a bit way over-the-top, the script by Jesse Mittelstadt and Richard Switzer is entertaining as it piles on one crazy plot point after another. Director David Benullo manages to keep things grounded enough to almost be believable but there are some really questionable bits of production and prop design. Not to pick on Layla Cushman and her extensive plastic surgery that makes her look like Kim Kardashian, but if they are going to provide her with a fake ID to sell the idea that she is Ellie Mills … use a current photo! The picture on the ID is at least 20 years old and even the police would have a hard time believing that photo was the woman in front of them. You get a new picture taken when your ID is renewed so it’s just crazy to think that a current ID would have such an old picture on it (in fact, it looks like one of those old Glamour Shots pictures, and it’s not even in color!). Speaking of pictures, the wedding photo Alice finds of David and New Alice is ridiculously crafted. It doesn’t even look like a good Photoshop job, rather the picture of New Alice looks to have been cut out and stuck over Real Alice. Another really laughable moment is when Sydney and Alice drive over to their company building. This place is supposed to be a mysterious, high tech company but instead of some shiny, metal and glass building, it’s an unassuming brick structure — perhaps that’s how they keep the place so top secret — that on the inside looks like a high school hallway. Literally. They couldn’t use the same office building that gets used for all of those ‘The Wrong (Something)’ movies?!? That location brought some unintentional hilarity to the proceedings. Also, when they get to another location — which even baffles the characters because it’s just a house — why is the laptop easily accessible to anyone who walks in? Jeremy can clearly see that someone is moving money from their company to Braeburn. Why would someone trying to cover all of their tracks be that sloppy? It’s these moments that make you want to throw your hands in the air in frustration because it takes you completely out of the moment. It’s just sloppy writing at that point.
The cast all do their best though. Cushman is effectively panicked and determined to prove that she does exist. She makes Alice a very sympathetic character and engages the audience enough that we want to see her win out in the end. (Although her staying with David was a bit of a surprise, even though he was a victim as well but the fact he didn’t put an end to things twenty years ago makes him a bit untrustworthy as a partner). Matthew Pohlkamp is always a bit shady as David, from hiding the letters to his odd phone calls (and who can he be speaking too since all of the suspects are at the same party?). He does perfectly play the ‘I don’t know this woman’ part when the real Alice confronts him, but by the end he should have been kicked to the curb so Alice and Chelsea can start their lives again as they move back to their old hometown and Alice gets her old job back (at double the salary!). Dina Freberg is also very good as Sydney, really treating Alice like they are the best of friends — even though it’s been years since they’ve seen each other — and is very convincing when he steps up to help Alice reclaim her identity, and never making it seem like she’s hiding any secrets from Alice. Celeste Blandon is also good as Ellie, giving enough suggestion in her performance that she is hiding something when offering Alice a ride home, and then showing her complete fear of whoever is blackmailing her when Alice finally catches up with her to get some answers. Generally in these movies, the actors have a tendency to telegraph their characters’ guilt right from the start, but everyone here does a nice job of not being obvious so that when the reveal comes, it is mostly a surprise (again, only if you haven’t seen the artwork).
If you can overlook some of the more egregiously questionable moments of the story (and the production), Stranger With My Name is an effective thriller with a decent mystery, a movie that is more fun watched in a group than alone. So invite your besties over, get out the charcuterie board, wine and popcorn and spend the next 90-minutes or so playing sleuth.
Stranger With My Name has a run time of 1 hour 27 minutes, and is rated TV-14.