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One would think that LMN would want to end their ‘Deadly Resolutions’ series of films with a bang — the month was front-loaded with two excellent movies that could have served as bookends — but instead they give us something on par with the generally shoddy The Wrong… movies, filled with some terrible acting and even more ludicrous plot points.
The Woman Before Me stars Tayler Hamilton as Jenna, a woman with the aspiration to launch her cookie business into the big time. Her husband, Grant (Phillip Andre Botello), is a lawyer at a high-power law firm. The couple has literally just moved into their new house, boxes still unpacked, and Grant has planned a dinner that night with his boss Matt (Aaron Berg) and his wife Rini (Christine Meehan-Berg), which goes terribly sideways when Jenna learns that the case Grant is working on involves mass personal injury but … he’s representing the company accused of the accident, and Matt grows very irritated that Jenna thinks it’s disgusting. Did she not know what kind of lawyer Grant is? Well, there are apparently a lot of things she doesn’t know about Grant, as Matt gushes about Grant’s magical hands — relax, he’s talking about Grant’s piano playing skills — and a very (very) drunk Rini keeps calling Jenna ‘Lena’ and apologizes by way of telling her how much she looks like Grant’s first wife. Jenna had no idea she was a second wife, so what other secrets can this man she now has no idea who he is can be hiding? She’s not eager to find out so she makes him sleep on the sofa. Matt isn’t happy about Rini’s behavior so he takes her home and then he goes back to his office. While Rini pours herself — and guzzles — a glass of wine, she hears a noise and it isn’t long before she finds the source of the noise … or rather it finds her, and that is the last glass of wine she’ll be having.
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The next morning Grant is already gone when Jenna wakes up, and it doesn’t even look like he slept on the couch (he allegedly was called into the office by Matt after midnight which isn’t suspicious at all). She calls him to remind him that her parents are coming into town for dinner with them that night, and he seems to be making excuses not to be there — he’ll be in depositions all day — but promises he will. The parents, only credited as Mom (Lisa Tirone King) and Dad (Tom Moynahan), arrive straight from their latest ‘As Seen on TV’ commercial (Dad could literally do Flex Seal commercials), and soon after Jenna is visited by Detective Moreno (Michelle Mazza) with the news that Rini is dead, and Matt’s alleged excuse about being at the office makes him a suspect. The detective wants to speak with Grant but he’s not answering his calls, so Jenna mentions that they’ll all be at dinner later so she can catch him there. We have to assume dinner happened and the detective showed up but Grant didn’t, because we’re only told that’s what happened. But Grant’s disappearing act further concerns Jenna and she tells him she doesn’t even want him in the house now. In addition to everything else, there has been a bizarre older gentleman insisting he must deliver a $30,000 piano for Grant — which apparently is a gift — but Jenna refuses to let him in and Grant claims he has no clue about the instrument. At Rini’s memorial service, one of Grant’s co-workers gasps when she sees Jenna and confirms she looks exactly like his late first wife, and has a picture to prove it. Grant begins to play a full piano concerto on a small keyboard (that doesn’t seem to be plugged in to anything), and Jenna spots a company photo which includes the dead ex. And yes, she looks like Jenna. The old man returns, already inside the house, and Jenna shoos him away again, but he warns her she should not turn down gifts like this. Jenna had questioned Matt at the memorial and he denied having anything to do with the piano, so she has no idea what to think. But more bodies begin to pile up as Jenna keeps digging into the mystery of Grant’s first wife, and Detective Moreno believes she’s finally unlocked the case after they discover several cameras and microphones hidden in the house which appear to be linked to Matt’s address. Moreno dashes off to the house believing he is the culprit but … he’s dead too. And she quickly follows him to the Great Beyond. Another detective arrives at Jenna’s to let her know Morena is dead … and Jenna has no clue that this guy is the same guy who was trying to force her to accept a piano delivery! Zero. It takes her a few minutes to even say, ‘Do I know you?’ Girl, do you need to go to America’s Best for an eye exam? Next thing Jenna knows, she’s waking up tied to a chair and all is revealed in one of the dumbest plot twists in history. I’m gonna spoil it for you, so if you really want to see this movie and be surprised, avert your eyes now.
The person who has been killing everyone — starting with Grant’s parents — is the old man posing as a piano delivery man and detective. Why? Because he was, you need to sit down for this one … Grant’s piano teacher when Grant was a child (a child prodigy, no less). Apparently Grant’s parents felt Mr. Joe was a bit too overbearing and withdrew Grant from his classes and Mr. Joe could not allow someone with Grant’s natural talent to just waste away. So he’s been killing people left and right — and that also includes Lena who, surprise, was Jenna’s identical twin she never knew about (now we’re throwing secret adoption into the mix) — to try to get Grant to realize his only true solace is his music. Luckily Jenna manages to get her hands untied and stabs Mr. Joe in the neck with a tuning fork! Two months later, her cookie business is about to take off and Jenna is moving to Chicago. What happened to Grant? We don’t know and Jenna doesn’t care. The End. Seriously. There is no resolution for Grant and we never see him again after he’s been questioned by Detective Morena at the police station, and that is only about halfway through the movie! Did the actor suddenly become unavailable and they had to write him out of the story?
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The Woman Before Me could have been a decent thriller. Could have been. But we should have known going in this wasn’t going to be good with a script by the writer of the equally ridiculous She Wants My Daughter, Guy Harry. As mentioned in that review, Harry has a history of comedy writing and both that movie and this one are treading on the edge of parody. Had Harry just gone for it made these stories spoofs of the typical LMN fare instead of trying to be a ‘serious’ writer, both would have been much better. I mean, come on, an elderly piano teacher as a serial killer to win his student back 20-some years later? And a tuning fork takes him out? This is the stuff of comedy … and you will laugh, but for all the wrong reasons. Also, there is never an explanation as to why all of the cameras in Jenna’s house were linked to Matt’s address. Harry is assisted in this misguided effort once again by director Ian Niles (who is also responsible for the just as bad A Home to Die For), who knows how to shoot a scene but seems to have no clue how to guide an actor through their roles, here allowing several of them to go completely over-the-top. It makes you wonder if this, and their previous film, weren’t comedies and the network just re-edited them to make them fit into the network’s style of thrillers. Had this been played for laughs, it would have succeeded.
As for the cast, Tayler Hamilton basically plays the role of Jenna straight. She’s the ordinary woman caught up in extraordinary circumstances. There’s nothing to fault in her performance. She keeps Jenna pretty balanced considering all of the insanity surrounding her, from the hair-trigger temper Matt, to her goofy parents, to a killer piano teacher. She keeps her part firmly in the dramatic instead of tipping over into the melodramatic, allowing the audience to view the story through her eyes. But from there things go sideways. Phillip Andre Botello seems to just stammer through the role of Grant. He can’t answer any questions directly, and any time Jenna confronts him he becomes a child with his hand caught in the cookie jar. The only time he really stands his ground with anyone is during his questioning by the detective. Unfortunately, the character is really a non-entity and you don’t even realize until the ‘Two Months Later’ epilogue that he’d been absent for half the movie.
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Aaron Berg, who according to his IMDb bio is a comedian, takes ‘over-the-top’ to a new level, from the dinner with Grant and Jenna, to his anger at Rini, and his seething rage with Jenna at the memorial. He’s also given some ridiculous dialogue about Grant’s piano skills which, perhaps, even he thought was to be played as comedy and no one told him otherwise. Christine Meehan-Berg (Aaron’s wife in real life?) plays drunk well enough, but she is given the most unflattering jumpsuit as a costume, grabbing her in all the wrong places. Lisa Tirone King and Tom Moynahan really do seem like they would be perfectly at home in an ‘As Seen on TV’ commercial in the way they deliver their dialogue (again, making this movie feel more parody than serious drama), with Moynahan in particular sounding like a TV pitchman. Moynahan is also given another of the movie’s perhaps most ridiculous moments when Jenna and Mom find him slouched in a chair at the kitchen table, his beard covered with what they think is blood. The women literally yell and shake him violently for a minute or so until he finally wakes up, the ‘blood’ actually jelly from a box of donuts he consumed. That whole seen is absolutely meant to be played as comedy, but again it’s presented as drama.
Michelle Mazza gives the second best performance in the movie because she actually seems to be in on the joke so she skillfully balances the deadpan delivery with a bit of a wink, a sly little hint of a smile as she says her lines, completely aware of how ridiculous all of this is (at one point during Grant’s interrogation, before a cut she even seems to be about to laugh). I actually found myself wanting to see more of her character because Mazza really seemed to be having a ball with the role. I’m not sure what to make of Peter Reznikoff’s performance as Mr. Joe. Like some of the others, he is really over-the-top as the piano delivery man but … maybe he’s supposed to be. He also has a very distinctive voice, a bit of Sydney Greenstreet in there, so the fact that because he shows up later in a suit instead of coveralls and a cap makes him unrecognizable to Jenna is maddening (but again, this leans into the ‘this movie is a spoof’ theory). Then he had to deliver his big monologue about Grant’s piano playing abilities with a straight face, which he does, which only makes the whole scene funnier than it was supposed to be (unless it was supposed to be funny). For good or bad, Reznikoff does manage to command the scenes he’s in so we’ll give him credit for that.
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One other thing — if you ever pay attention to these things, most of these movies feature a moment where someone needs to search for something on the internet and we always see the search engine main screen, usually with some goofy name but colors that absolutely suggest it is a Google search page. We’re going to highlight these silly moments starting right here and now as Jenna tries to search for any information she can find about Grant’s dead wife, using the ‘Noodle’ search engine. I’m telling you, if you doubted this movie wasn’t meant to be a comedy, the choice of that name makes it clear that it was. In any case, The Woman Before Me is by no means a good movie, but the absurdity of it all gives it a certain unintentional entertainment value, something best watched with friends who are unafraid to make snarky comments during the movie. This would be a perfect candidate for the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment, and that’s why I’ll give it an extra star.
The Woman Before Me has a run time of 1 hour 30 minutes, and is rated TV-14.