Lifetime
Lifetime ventures away from the ‘Ripped from the Headlines’ stories with the latest Sunday mystery movie, The Life I Can’t Remember, which borrows its central storyline from the classic soap opera trope — amnesia. The story starts with an unknown woman running into the street right in front of a car. Next thing you know she’s in the hospital, waking up sometime the next day, physically fine but unable to recall anything that happened the night before … or at any time before the present moment. Out of the blue a man shows up and tells the doctor he’s her husband, but she has no idea who he is. She’s kept overnight for observation, she has a realistic nightmare about someone in a hoodie chasing her, and her husband brings all the paperwork to prove he is who he says he is so he can check her out of the hospital and take her home.
But he doesn’t take her home, he takes them to their vacation home so she can rest and recuperate, even though she protests that she needs to be home and surrounded by familiar items and people to help restore her memory. Dean, her husband who is also a psychiatrist, insists that she just needs to rest, rest, rest. Cooped up in the house all day is not helping so they finally walk into town to get dinner, and Dean wants them seated in a secluded area but his wife insists she’s fine and they can sit anywhere. On the way out, a bartender named Ryan calls out to her, knowing her name is Emma, recognizing her from her past visits. Dean insists on ushering her out, and Ryan seems perplexed when Dean mentions he’s her husband. Dean has some of their friends, Terrence and Chloe, come for a visit to help Emma remember, but when the two leave it’s quite clear Chloe has no idea who Emma or Dean are, and for that matter isn’t Terrence’s girlfriend. She’s being paid to play along.
Emma grows more suspicious when none of the phone numbers in her contacts work except Dean’s and Chloe’s, and she ventures into town by herself where she encounters another restaurant employee who remembers her and Dean, saying the two seemed to be having a fight and Emma called him a stalker. Hoping to get more confirmation from Ryan, she calls the restaurant and learns he was murdered after his shift in what the police believe to be a robbery gone wrong (we, the audience, already know who killed poor, sweet Ryan). The detective investigating Emma’s case finds the man who was driving the car that hit Emma and then obtains cell phone footage of the aftermath of the accident in which a man in a hoodie is visible. She shows the video and a photograph of Dean to the driver and he confirms that’s the man he saw. Doing a little B&E to get into Emma’s actual house, the detective finds some shocking evidence to prove Dean isn’t who he claims to be, knowing the clock is ticking on Emma’s life.
Lifetime
The Life I Can’t Remember is as bland as they come, mainly because there’s no real suspense. Anyone with a pair of eyes, or even one eye, could plainly see that Dean is not Emma’s husband. The attempt at sustaining any suspense is in how long it will take Emma, or the police, to figure out what we already know. Does the fault lie with the actor, the director, the writer, or any combination of the three? There are certainly choices here that could have been made to play the part in such a way that it isn’t obvious from the second Dean walks into Emma’s hospital room that he isn’t her husband. The fact that the doctor isn’t suspicious is just lazy plotting. Did actor Gabriel Pranter make the decision to play Dean so obviously suspect, or did director Amy Barrett coach him? It’s hard to say but had he acted more natural instead of jittery, we could have had a decent thriller. Just more moments with an unseen person in a hoodie would have amped up the tension a bit. Throw in some red herrings of a hoodied person walking down the street when they’re in town. Don’t show us Ryan’s killer. There is plenty that could have been done to make Dean’s guilt much less obvious.
Of course the whole story culminates with the detective discovering the truth — illegally — and racing to get to Emma, while Emma’s full memory of who Dean is comes flooding back resulting in her being tied up, with Dean preparing to kill her. Luckily the detective arrives in the knick of time, and we get one of the most gentle and slow-moving fights ever committed to film as the detective seems to just tap Dean on the back with a golf club, then he taps her head on the floor … KNOCKING HER OUT! All the while Emma has a tiny piece of cloth in her mouth as a gag and she can barely make a sound. Gagging someone is such a dumb trope by this point because simply having that cloth across your mouth won’t prevent you from making any noise! You can still scream with a gag in your mouth! Emma could have told the cop ‘BEHIND YOU’ when Dean was sneaking up on her instead of trying to play charades while her hands and feet were tied to the chair. This stuff is so played out by this point it just becomes overly campy. I’m sure the Rifftrax crew would have a field day with this one.
As for the cast, Pranter is fine but the choices he and the director make in how he plays the character diffuse all tension that the film could have had. Morgan Bradley does a good job as Emma, and at least she has a reason for not seeing Dean for who he is, but the script still makes her too much of a victim. Tryphena Wade is also good as Detective Wise, and she’s given just the slightest bit of backstory that makes her more determined than ever to solve the case of who was chasing Emma. Probably the one real stand-out is Andrew Steel as Terrence, giving him a total sleazeball persona. Melanie Au-Yeung is also good as Chloe, but the writers should have allowed her to have an attack of conscience and try to tell Emma that everything was a lie, setting her up as another of the hooded killer’s victims.
It’s hard to fault any of the on-screen talent for their work because they did the best they could with the material they were given. The writers — Robert Dean Klein, Jeffrey Schenck and Peter Sullivan — just took the easy way out with plotting this story (Schenck was behind the equally predictable Betrayed by Love). Director Amy Barrett does some decent work, getting her shots framed and lit nicely, but she also fails to give the film any sense of tension by just giving it all away right up front. We can’t even be yelling at the TV for Emma to see that she’s in danger because of her amnesia. Just a lot of missed opportunities her to make this a really solid mystery/thriller, and in the end you’ll wonder if you have amnesia because The Life I Can’t Remember is easily forgettable.
The Life I Can’t Remember has a run time of 1 hour 30 minutes, and is rated TV-14.
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