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It’s a new year so that means the Lifetime Movie Network, aka LMN, is kicking off a new month of movies under the ‘Deadly Resolutions’ umbrella. As faithful viewers and readers know, the quality of the storytelling for an LMN movie can vary wildly from extremely clever and well-thought-out to ‘did AI write this?’ Whoever does the scheduling at the network, though, is generally on the ball, programming the best of the lot to launch the month (or at least have something on theme as they did with December’s ‘Slay Bells’ movies). Of course, none of the January movies really have anything to do with New Year’s Eve or Day, but the network did give us what may arguably be the best movie of the month with this thriller that borrows from the best of the mysteries out there, from Agatha Christie to Columbo (or Poker Face, if you will).
The Past Is Never Buried is really centered around a man named Alton, who was accused of killing his wife twenty years ago, but the cops could never find enough evidence to pin it on him. The stigma, though, has hung over Alton for two decades and nearly everyone in the small town looks at him with a side-eye and keeps their distance. The only family Alton has is his estranged daughter Emily, and his sister-in-law Deena and her husband Pete. Any little infraction Alton is involved with puts Detective Gates on high alert, and his suspicions kick into high gear when a young girl goes missing after leaving her shift at the diner late one night. Sadly, the girl, Jordyn, is found dead in the woods by the same method as Alton’s wife, strangulation with twine, a detail not released to the public so only the killer would know … which of course means it had to be Alton. Gates has him arrested almost immediately, and he uses his one call to get in touch with Emily, who he had only spoken to briefly before his arrest to let her know he had a little accident — not because he was drinking, he claims — that left his passenger side door with a large dent. Emily isn’t sure why he felt the need to tell her this but he just wanted to get ahead of the news before Deena or anyone else blabbed to her. Now he needs her to help prove his innocence by selling his house, which is in her name, and hiring a high-powered attorney. Emily reluctantly agrees to sell the house, but she’s only staying for one day. Famous last words.
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Emily has also been working with a man named Noah, a documentarian creating a piece that may help find her mother’s killer, something Alton has been strongly opposed to for some reason. He shows up in town to continue his interviews, and Emily learns it’s hard to sell a house with a tainted past … especially when someone spray paints ‘MURDERER’ on the side of it. Noah offers to help Emily try to exonerate … or convict … her father, whichever the case may be, but as they delve deeper into the death of the young girl, and uncover more evidence including old photographs and a description of the SUV that picked up the girl, Emily and Noah begin to believe there is more afoot in this town than they first believed, and somehow the murders twenty years apart are connected. But to whom?
A good mystery works by keeping the audience in the dark just enough to be surprised by the reveal at the end, but provides them with enough clues and suspects to form an opinion on how they think it will end. How this all plays out is dependent on the skill of the writer, but once that script is turned in it then falls on the director and cast to play the story as naturally as possible. More often than not in these TV movie mysteries, the game is given up early in the presentation by some much too obvious acting, the actor playing the perp usually over-compensating a bit too much for the audience to not be surprised when they are unmasked at the end. The better ones can go in two different directions — either with everyone acting completely natural or with everyone acting just shady enough so that we can say ‘oh, they did it’ and then ‘well, no, maybe it’s that one’. The Past is Never Buried actually has a bit of both, while setting up situations that also lead you in one direction but take a completely different turn. Trying to remain as spoiler-free as possible here, I’ll just say that the young girl murdered in the present is shown in a flashback agreeing to get in the SUV. It’s highly unlikely she would have willingly gotten into a vehicle with Alton, and in my mind the only person she would have been comfortable enough with to get in the car was a woman. Was I right? Let’s just say that writer Margaret Cole keeps you on your toes, taking all of your expectations and throwing them back in your face, constructing this story of a present totally informed by the past, completely surprising you with the multi-layered outcome. According to IMDb, this is only Cole’s second screenplay, the first being Where Pretty Girls Die, which was a serviceable thriller a bit too over-stuffed with red herrings. Here Cole has really honed her storytelling, adding layer upon layer of story to give us a truly surprising conclusion. Both films were also directed by Christine Conradt, who seems to have a better grip on the cast, reigning in any tendencies to be obvious while also allowing others to be just enough off-kilter to make you think they are the culprit, misdirecting you from the truth. If there was only one small complaint … the final confrontation with Emily and the killer ends with a bit of a whimper. By that point you want Emily’s German shepherd to take them down, especially after Emily is under attack. It just ended a bit too quickly and politely. Other than that, this is a pretty gripping and well-crafted mystery movie.
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The cast also does a great job of keeping us wondering. The one person we know isn’t a suspect is Emily, so Bonnie Jean Tyler is really the stand-in for the viewer. We can identify with her because we know as little about what is happening as she does. But Tyler shows us Emily’s lived-in experience, her trauma of losing her mother to murder and not knowing for decades if the killer was her father or someone else. Her resistance to helping him is understandable, and Tyler informs her entire performance with that lingering grief and hatred she’s developed over the years. Her whole performance changes as she becomes convinced that perhaps her father is innocent after all, and she becomes determined to gather all of the pieces of the puzzle and put them together to complete the picture. Tyler really makes Emily a character we can empathize with and root for as she gains more and more clarity into the situation. Really nice work.
Ulisses Gonsalves has a bit of a difficult character to play in Noah. As a documentarian, he should be a sort of neutral character but the way Gonsalves plays him there is always just a little something shady behind his outward demeanor. Sometimes we have to wonder if he had anything to do with the murder in the present to perhaps give his production a little more excitement for a sale to the streaming outlets. We really don’t know what his credentials are or if he’s even a legit filmmaker. And as he seems to develop a more romantic interest in Emily, Gonsalves’ performance just feels that Noah is using her for his own gain, and there is one moment that supports that belief. But when he realizes he truly screwed up his relationship with Emily, his performance becomes a bit more sincere. Wade Hunt Williams plays Alton with a perpetual chip on his shoulder, and rightly so. He’s a man who has been constantly fighting against an entire town’s perception of him so his indignance is rightfully earned, but there is still enough in the performance to make us wonder if he was responsible for, at least, his wife’s murder. However, he plays his innocence in the girl’s murder honestly, and he gets a nice moment during an interrogation to flip the script on the detective who is obviously trying to set him up. Williams actually earns our sympathy for Alton, allowing us to see he has been wrongly accused in both cases.
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Preston James Hillier gives a pretty straightforward performance as Detective Gates. He is a man driven by decades of certainty that Alton killed his wife, frustrated by not having the evidence he’s needed to arrest and convict this man he is convinced is a murderer. He is dogged in his pursuit, and the murder of the teen seems to be how he will finally nail Alton. Through his performance, Hillier also shows Gates’ chip on his shoulder for his past failure, his short fuse on display when Noah interviews him and purposely pokes at him about not being able to solve that murder twenty years ago just to get a reaction, which makes for good footage for his documentary but could also point at something else. Is Gates just a man determined, or is he hiding something? Hillier’s performance never really gives anything away, allowing us to be caught off guard when all of the secrets are revealed.
Philip Boyd, last seen as an investigative journalist in My Mother the Madam, doesn’t have a lot to do except play the angry and grieving father of the murdered girl, but he does manage to keep his emotions in check and does not allow Brad to lash out, even having sympathy for Emily for the murder of her mother, even though they both believe at the time that her father may have killed both of them. Owen Correll plays his son, Devin, but he is a bit over-the-top at times, raging during a press conference that he’s going to personally come after whoever killed his sister, and then having an odd response when Gates approaches him and asks why he’s sitting in his sister’s car: ‘It’s mine now’, which immediately makes you wonder if he killed his sister out of jealousy (even though he could not have known the circumstance of the earlier murder, at least not that we know of). Correll’s performance made Devin seem more guilty than anyone else. Sean B. Garick and Nicole Britton also do some nice work as Emily’s Uncle Pete and Aunt Deena. Garick’s Pete just seems to be an average guy who is always looking out for everyone else, while Britton’s Deena seems a little more shady, but she of course carries the trauma of her sister being murdered so while she tries to not speak badly of Alton, she clearly has some disdain for him. But there is still just enough in her performance to also make us wonder what she actually knows about the past, and if she has any connection to the murder in the present … like is she the person driving the SUV? Everyone gives really good performances and the final moment of the movie really put them all into perspective.
LMN’s movies can be hit or miss, but the network has started off 2026 with a real cracker of a mystery filled with a twisty plot worthy of Agatha Christie, and a collection of actors who knew what the assignment was and carried it out to perfection. This was a great way to kick off the new year.
The Past Is Never Buried has a run time of 1 hour 30 minutes, and is rated TV-14.