by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Lifetime showed the “world premiere” of a
surprisingly good thriller called Hidden Truth, set in the small mountain community of Mammoth Lakes, California
(though despite the plural name it seems to have only one lake) and starting with one of Lifetime’s familiar
teaser scenes: a young woman is bound by an assailant who hits her on the
forehead with a large rock, then wraps her up and takes her out in a rowboat to
the middle of the lake, where he drops her overboard with an anchor chained to
her leg so even if she survived the clout from the rock, she’ll sink and drown.
Then there’s a title reading “Two Days Earlier,” and it turns out that two days
earlier Zoë Nevin (Diana Hopper) had just about saved up enough money to escape
Mammoth Lakes and move to Los Angeles. She’s got the money in the first place
by being in a sleazy relationship with the owner of the resort which seems to
give Mammoth Lakes whatever economy it has — we don’t even see a grocery store
or a gas station even though it’s obvious the Mammoth Lakians have to have some way of fueling both themselves and their vehicles.
The only other business we see is “Pace’s Auto and Boat Repair,” a sort of
outdoor garage run by Pace Nevin (Brendan McCarthy), Zoë’s father, a recovering
alcoholic who was still drinking a year earlier when his wife Layla (played by
Heidi Fialek in a flashback even though she’s been dead a year at the start of
the story) ran away from him at a bar and ended up, you guessed it, hit by a
rock and drowned in the middle of the lake. The local sheriff, Underwood (yet another seedy-law-enforcement-officer-in-a-small-town role
by former Hardy Boy Parker Stevenson), and his deputy, Simons (Evan Scott
Wood), are both convinced Pace Nevin murdered his wife, and when (after another
title, reading “Two Days Later, takes us back to the story’s present) Zoë’s
body is found in the lake, hit with a rock and then drowned just like her mom
was a year before. Bumbling cops Underwood and Simons, showing a degree of
stick-to-it-iveness towards the wrong conclusion that makes Inspectors Lestrade
and Gregson seem like models of open-mindedness by comparison, are so convinced Pace Nevin is guilty of this crime, too —
they assume Zoë caught him in the act of killing her mom and so he killed her to
shut her up (a year later?) — they utterly refuse to consider any other
possibilities.
The actual lead character is Zoë’s aunt Jamie (Sarah Lind), who
took over raising Zoë after Layla was murdered while Pace stepped back from the
family to sober up, and it doesn’t take her long before she turns up another
suspect: Michael Evans (Shawn Christian), the resort owner, who had paid Zoë
the money she’d been saving for her escape. As a 16-year-old she had worked at
the resort for a few months but Michael apparently decided he couldn’t resist
her sexually, so he paid her for sex and possibly some other, even sleazier
things as well — about two-thirds of the way through we learn that though
Michael’s resort is ostensibly a respectable establishment, there’s an ongoing
drug supermarket behind its back wall, and it’s hinted that among the foul
things Michael had Zoë doing for him is dealing drugs as well as letting him
fuck her. In the teaser we already learned that she was only going to have sex
with him one more time and then was going to take the money and get out of
town, and when he insists she’ll keep working for him, she points out it’s her
17th birthday and if he gives her any trouble she’ll report him to
the cops for having sex with an underage girl. That seems to be what drove him
off the deep end and led him to kill her after she tried to flee through the
woods surrounding the lake and he managed to catch her. Jamie collects more and
more evidence implicating Michael in the murder of her daughter, including
finding a wishbone-shaped charm from a bracelet Zoë was given for her birthday,
but the sheriffs refuse to consider it — though a third person in the sheriff’s
office helps her by supplying her a printout documenting that Michael owns the
land from which he rowed the boats to the middle of the lake to drown both
Layla and Zoë. Meanwhile, in order to make his frame complete, Michael steals a
coffee cup from Pace’s car (Pace is so easygoing he not only parks his car
outside his business but leaves it unlocked) and plants it in one of the
rowboats, thereby leading Underwood and Simons to arrest him — only Jamie knows the cup wasn’t there earlier because she had already
searched the rowboats herself. Eventually Michael decides he’s going to have to
eliminate Jamie as well, but the cops finally catch on and arrest him just in time, while his wife
Veronique (Jessica Morris), who was willing to lie for him earlier on, turns
state’s evidence against him.
Effectively and suspensefully directed by Steven
R. Monroe from a well-constructed script by Richard O. Lowry (even though I
think Lowry made a mistake by giving the two sets of characters such similar
last names — it took me a while to realize that the good guys were named
“Nevin” and the bad guy “Evans”), Hidden Truth isn’t a great film but it’s Lifetime at close to its
best: Lowry avoids the absurd melodramatics of other Lifetime writers and
Monroe trusts the script enough to tell it in a straightforward manner free of
visual or editing tricks. The cast is also quite fine: Sarah Lind is solid in
the role of the “sleuth” character, unable to believe her brother could have
committed such crimes and determined to avenge her niece by finding the real
killer; Brendan McCarthy is properly air-headed as the brother who seems more
overwhelmed than anything else by being falsely accused of murder and having
that accusation hang over his head for a year in a typical movie small town
where everybody knows everybody else’s business; and Shawn Christian nails both
the superficial charm of his character (one reason the sheriff and his deputy
are so sure he didn’t do it is he’s such a respected and influential citizens
in the town, the closest thing Mammoth Lakes has to a 1-percenter) and the
depravity beneath without resorting to the scenery-chewing other actors have
done as Lifetime villains. It also helps that he’s decent-looking but not
drop-dead gorgeous — one of the most monotonous Lifetime affectations is the
insistence of their casting directors that virtually every hot-looking male in their casts must be a
black-hearted villain!
