Movie Review :: Lifetime Movie Network’s The Paradise Murders

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‘Shocktober’ continues on LMN, but don’t expect anything Autumnal from the network’s latest mystery-thriller The Paradise Murders. This one eschews the Fall foliage for the Summery beach weather for a vacation gone awry for married couple Emma and Jake. The plot has many twists and turns that will keep your head spinning … or it could be all the stripe patterned shirts Emma and Jake wear. Be warned, there be spoilers ahead.

Things start off well enough as the couple finds themselves in a bit of a rut, the romance seemingly gone out of the relationship. Not that they don’t love each other, but their daily lives just keep getting in the way so Jake does what any good husband would do — plan a vacation to a beach resort Emma had fond memories of from her childhood. Emma is able to take a week off from work, so off they go to the beachside paradise to settle in to their hotel room. While Jake is unwinding from the flight, Emma meets Isla, a woman on their shared balcony who seems to be straight out of the 1920s trying hard to sound American. Emma is cordial but she already has a weird vibe from the stranger. When she and Jake hit the beach, they immediately meet another couple, Sarah and Tom, and immediately hit it off, becoming BFFs in a matter of minutes. The group’s closeness doesn’t go unnoticed by Isla who, the next day, tries to invite Emma and Jake to dinner with her and — as Emma puts it — her henchman of a boyfriend Jarrod. Emma gives her a firm maybe then runs to Sarah and asks her if she and Tom want to go to dinner that night … but Sarah give her a firm maybe and runs off. What the heck? That friendship seems to have fizzled quickly. But at least Isla and Jarrod are there to console Emma, not that she really wants consoling from them. And things grow even more concerning when Sarah shows up at the restaurant alone, and late that night (or, rather, very early in the morning) Emma wakes up alone. Texting Jake to see where he is, his phone next to the bed buzzes but Jake is nowhere to be found. When he finally returns he claims he was not feeling well and needed some air and quickly brushes off his wife’s concerns.

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The next morning, Emma hears a commotion outside and looks over the balcony to see a crowd gathered by the pool. Rushing down to see what’s going on, she sees her new BFF dead, apparently having hit her head and fallen into the pool. But Emma isn’t buying the accident story, and Jake is still acting really weird. Luckily Emma seems to have another friend in the restaurant’s waiter Lee. During their first dinner with Sarah and Tom, Emma had asked Lee about a particular cake she loved, a honey cake, that she could not remember the name of. Lee tells her it is called Medavik … but they don’t serve it anymore. But when Sarah got back to her room, there was a piece of Medavik waiting for her (which did not look like a traditional Medavik which has eight thin layers of cake and icing, while the slice Emma received had three thick layers of cake with icing … but who’s counting?). To help Emma be distracted from the tragedy of Sarah’s death, Lee also suggests she and Jake take a path to a beach only the locals know about (Lee is a local so he knows the non-touristy spots). Emma and Jake also try to console Tom, and a hotel housekeeper has a note for Emma supposedly written by Sarah to give her a warning. Seeing that the page is torn from Sarah’s diary, which she had been writing in before her death, Emma needs to find the diary a task that becomes more urgent when she finds a corner piece of paper from the diary that had apparently fallen out of Jarrod’s pocket. Things get even more concerning when Tom turns up dead, Emma is shown photos of Jake and Sarah the night of her death holding hands, and is notified when being forced into paying for cocktails for Isla and Jarrod that her card has been declined, checking her bank balance to see that it is at zero. And she can’t reach Jake, who is supposedly in town identifying Tom’s body. But she does have the diary … and finds herself being chased around the hotel by Jarrod. She seeks help from Lee who tells her there is a way out through the kitchen, but Jarrod still catches up to her which ends with the two of them in the indoor pool. Emma manages to kick Jarrod in the face and gets away with the diary, which is now ruined because it also fell into the pool. But when she returns to her room, there is a room service cart with a plate of food and … a slice of Medavik. Oh, and Lee is hiding in the room too, revealing himself to her and going off on some crazy tangent that he remembered her from when they were kids and he was so in love with her then and how he was certain she was in love with him and he did all of this for her. He reveals that Sarah was working with Isla and Jarrod to scam Jake, so she had to die. Tom was also in the way so he had to die too. As well as the housekeeper. Turns out the note she gave Emma was actually written by Lee as sort of a red herring, but at least she knows Jake wasn’t having an affair. But Lee is a bit too obsessed with her and since she is not reciprocating the affection, well, she has to die too. Luckily while he’s choking her out, she walks him over to the room service cart and grabs a champagne bottle to crack his skull with. Jake later reveals that Sarah wasn’t working with Isla and Jarrod, she was warning Jake that he was being targeted. So all’s well that ends well, Isla, Jarrod and Lee are arrested, and Lee gets the harshest of punishments for all the murders. Eleven months later while watching the news about Lee’s sentencing, Jake brings up the idea of planning a vacation … which neither of them thinks is a good idea. Good call.

The Paradise Murders is a decent enough time killer. The mystery of who is doing what to whom builds up pretty well, but the introduction of a hoodied killer is way to reminiscent of the hoodied killer in Murder at the Hotel … and it seems pretty obvious exactly who it is. Director Richard Switzer has a lot of puzzle pieces to juggle here to not make things too on the nose, and he does a pretty decent job although he should have had some of the actors dial back their performances because, as it seems typical for these movies, some of them are signaling much too hard that they are the culprit or are behaving too over-the-top to distract from the real culprits (in this case, several of them).

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Kayla Raelle is fine as Emma. She’s put in the position of the innocent in an extraordinary circumstance and decides to become Jessica Fletcher and ignore the detective’s order to let them do their job (but, let’s face it, the police are generally useless in these movies, always looking in the wrong direction). So while Raelle gives Emma some confidence to look for clues herself, she also has to become a bit too paranoid when it comes to Jake, at one point outright accusing him of having an affair but not letting him explain. She does what she can with how the character is written. Mo Sehgal starts out well, but his character is also undone by the writing which forces him to act suspicious, stumbling over his words when Emma asks him where he was in the middle of the night, and just being weird for the rest of the movie which builds Emma’s paranoia. Just once it would be nice to see a married couple actually talk things out and work together to solve a crime, but then the movie would have been fifteen minutes long. The biggest question here is — why so many stripes?!? Raelle has at least three striped tops, one of them utterly ridiculous with square shoulder pads that make her look like she’s shrugging the whole time. There is another unflattering outfit with a striped top and red pants that just needed a scarf and beret and she could have done a mime performance. Sehgal also has at least one black-and-white striped shirt that looks like one of Raelle’s, but thankfully they don’t wear them at the same time. I don’t think my TV could have handled all that.

Taija James doesn’t have much to do as Sarah. She seems perfectly natural as Emma’s new friend, but then she has to act suspicious when she could have just asked Emma to meet her in her room so she could tell her what was going on. Christopher Dover is also saddled with being overly suspect after Sarah dies, and even when he tells Emma that he loved Sarah it never sounds convincing. Richard Goss is mostly silent as Jarrod, just a hulking, menacing presence who seems to be under Isla’s thumb. Emily Pick has a couple of scenes as housekeeper Vera, seeming to want to help Emma but again not allowed to actually say anything specific about what is going on. Boyana Avdjieva’s Isla speaks in a weird staccato way making it seem like she’s trying hard to use an American accent which is not native to her, and that makes her entire performance just feel a bit over-the-top. James Wiles seems to also be trying hard to hide a British or Irish accent, and his portrayal of Lee is a bit too wide-eyed and eager to please. Also the way he’s directed to use his facial expressions to look like he’s up to something makes him the obvious candidate to be the person in the hoodie. To be clear, no one gives a bad performance but some seem to struggle with accents and are constrained by how they are directed and written.

The Paradise Murders could have been a really terrific murder mystery with a laundry list of suspects, and the story does throw some curve balls. It just becomes a bit frustrating when the actors telegraph their intentions or are forced to behave in a way that wants you to believe they are guilty of something. There was a similar issue with the director’s previous outing, A Home to Die For. But when a movie is produced in about two weeks, it’s a miracle everyone can pull off something that’s even half decent. It’s not the best murder mystery ever produced but it’s not the worst. If the performances had just been a tad more natural, this could have been a real cracking whodunit. The biggest mystery you may be guessing about is where the movie was filmed. (Bulgaria!)

The Paradise Murders has a run time of 1 hour 30 minutes, and is rated TV-14.