Last night I watched the "world premiere" of a Lifetime TV-movie called, in the best tradition of Christine Conradt's titling strategies even though she didn't write this one, "A Daughter's Nightmare." It's one of those Lifetime productions (the company is credited as "Sepia Films," even though the movie is actually in color) that takes place in Washington state so the actual shoot can be just across the border in British Columbia, Canada (specifically the town of Kelowna), and it starts at the funeral where the heroine, Dana (Victoria Pratt), is burying her husband after he lost a long battle with lung cancer. The main attendees are Dana's daughter Ariel (a quite good Emily Osment) and the late husband's veterinarian brother Cameron (Richard Karn), though in the background we see a heavy-set man lurking around. When next we see him we learn that his name is Adam Smith (Paul Johansson, physically well cast in that he's not drop-dead gorgeous but he looks good enough to come off as a plausible romantic partner for Dana) and that he has a nice-looking but disturbed young son (stepson, actually, a point screenwriter Shelley Gillen is careful to make) named Ben (played by the quite hot Gregg Sulkin in a performance that avoids the twin traps of playing a psycho — the obvious wall-crawling one of Lawrence Tierney and the ridiculously boyish approach of Anthony Perkins in Psycho), whom Adam has taken to a therapist (Janet Anderson) and who resists being labeled as having a mental illness. Ben and Ariel attend the same college, and since Ariel makes it a point of going home to mom's place every weekend, Adam makes it a point of giving Ariel a ride so he can meet Dana, whom he intends to start dating.
Of course, being the male protagonist of what Maureen Dowd called a "pussies-in-peril" movie, his intentions are considerably darker than that, though Gillen and director/cinematographer Vic Sarin (whose name in the credits led me to joke, "Oh, no! It's directed by a poison gas!") take their time letting us know just what they are. They do make a point that Adam had wanted to become a doctor, only his grades weren't good enough for medical school so he became an ER nurse instead — which gives him a point of commonality with Ariel, who's studying to be a vet like her uncle — and it also gives him an entrée with Dana. He meets Dana at a grief group Ariel told him she was attending — when the sequence started and she introduced herself with a full name, and was told, "First names only, here," I joked, "My name is Dana and I'm an alco- — oops, wrong group." Though there are a few familiar Lifetime-style plot holes in Gillen's script, it's actually a quite chilling suspense tale, made more interesting by the absence of much in the way of outright violence (Adam isn't a thug, and it makes him a considerably more interesting villain), the ambiguity over Adam's motives and the nice reversal that that hot young man the young girl is dating isn't the crazy one in his family — his (step)dad is. It also helps in the verisimilitude department that Victoria Pratt and Emily Osment look enough like each other to be credible as mother and daughter (though, oddly, Paul Johansson and Gregg Sulkin also resemble each other enough that they'd be credible as father and son even though the script tells us they're not biologically related). A Mother's Nightmare is not a great movie, but it's a genuinely chilling thriller, several cuts above the Lifetime norm.
