Hello again! Welcome to the second free Don’t Threaten Me With a Good Lifetime for January. If you’d like to see two actors at extremely different places in their careers, you’re in luck! I watched CYBERSTALKER, a film from 2012 starring Mischa Barton, Dan Levy, and a confusing grasp of what the 2012 internet was capable of. (Content warnings for murder, intense stalking and accompanying PTSD, vehicular death, and the kind of weird ableism you get when a non-disabled person plays a disabled person, a thing I will be digging into more in a subscriber bonus that will go out soon. Hint!)
SEPTEMBER 3, 1999: a person in all black emerges from what a chyron identifies as his “Stalker’s Lair” and slips into a gigantic suburban house using hacked alarm codes. The object of his obsession is a teen girl named Aiden Ashley (well, a “teen” girl, it’s Mischa Barton), who arrives home with her parents as the stalker is walking around her room touching her stuff. You can tell Aiden is Artsy because she has her own paintings on her walls, and also because she has green streaks in her hair. Aiden heads to her room while her mom tells her to stay off the computer. They’ve already called the police about Aiden’s (cyber)stalker, and the cop told them to not let her use the computer at all, email, social networking, nothing. So why does Aiden have a computer in her room at all? I don’t know. Also, what the hell kind of “social networking” was happening in 1999? I looked it up and apparently there was something called Six Degrees Dot Com, which I had absolutely not heard of as a teen. Is the cop telling her she can’t hang out in Yahoo chat rooms? We just called those chat rooms. Sorry, I’m getting off track here, but it’s just very funny to me that this cop is out on the vanguard of technological innovation, in contrast to real-life cops who still need to have the concept of “Instagram” explained to them. Anyway, long story short, the stalker is still in the house and he murders both of Aiden’s parents. The stalker escapes, but so does Aiden, into the arms of a Philadelphia police detective named Detective Page.
LITERALLY EXACTLY THIRTEEN YEARS LATER: Detective Page flips through the case file for Aiden’s parents’ murders, and laments to his partner Detective Bonham that the only witness, Aiden herself, has completely disappeared off the face of the planet. (Detectives Bonham and Page! I never liked Led Zeppelin. You can’t make me.) She has no credit cards, bank accounts, or social media profiles. Bonham pops her name into a website called Popular Pals and it pulls up something that sure looks like her, but Page correctly says that the stalker probably put that up himself. They send “Aiden” a message (from whose account? it doesn’t matter) and the stalker, in his Lair, responds immediately.
Now to meet 13-years-later adult Aiden, in her “Artist’s Loft,” which here seems to mean “an apartment with pretty high ceilings and some easels and paints strewn about.” She talks to her friend Jill about what a bummer the anniversary of her parents’ death is, and how much it sucks to be a loner mole person using a fake last name. Jill gives her a pep talk, but then has to go see a patient. Jill is a therapist! This will come up one more time and then it won’t matter at all. Anyway, Aiden has to go to her gallery to drop off a painting. As she hangs it on the wall, a young handsome guy checks out the painting and the woman hanging it, and the gallerist swoops in to talk up the both of them. Aren’t the brushstrokes wonderful! Isn’t Aiden a beautiful genius! Wouldn’t you like to date her! Well, he buys the painting, anyway. I don’t date anybody who doesn’t subscribe to my newsletter, so I get it.
Back at the police station, a guy named Jack Dayton meets with Detective Page. Jack Dayton a) is played by DAN LEVY, b) uses a wheelchair, and it’s never explained why, which at first seemed kind of admirable but by the end of the movie just seems weird, c) is with something called CYBERCRIMETICS, which is not pronounced “cyber crime ticks” but the other way it might be pronounced. Those crime ticks’ll getcha. Jack explains to Page that they traced the IP address that replied to the Popular Pals post to a hotel “on the east coast” (they are on the east coast; many, many things are on the east coast) so maybe they’ve got him!
While they check out that lead, Aiden meets with her gallerist, Winton Cornelis, in her apartment. Winton, an older guy with an expansive British accent, comments on Aiden’s rotary phone and she replies that it belonged to her parents and she likes it. She hates technology! It drives people apart! I think Aiden would find a lot to like in a little fellowship called “the Amish.” I like Amish folks generally, they sold us a tractor and when we called to ask about it a random child answered the town phone and then had to go down the street to get the guy who knew about the tractor. Good stuff! Also good stuff: a new still life of dying peonies that Aiden has just finished. Winton tells her that she needs to do a show, one night only, and only fancy people who will actually buy her art, no looky-loos or stalkers. Aiden reluctantly agrees even though she doesn’t think she’s ready.
Jack Dan Cybercrimetics Levy Dayton has a new tool to try to track down Aiden, which I suppose they’re doing so they can help her (?). They have one of her paintings in evidence, and Jack explains that a brushstroke is as unique as a fingerprint, and he developed a program called “E-Lator” that will just, trawl the internet looking at paintings I guess until it finds a match? None of this seems real, certainly not with 2012 technology. How old is Clearview? Can Clearview do this? Can any computer do this? I found a couple papers about using brushstrokes to confirm the attribution of an artwork, but that seems like science, whereas this seems like nonsense. Unfortunately, back in the Stalker’s Lair, he’s accessed the police department’s computers and is watching the E-Lator do its nonsense work.
We’re working on a tight schedule here, and it’s time for Aiden’s art show. Winton gives a little speech about how Aiden Cornelis (she took his name for her fake one, that’s…sweet) will someday be seen as the equal of Manet or Basquiat. Ah, just how someday I will be seen as the equal of Didion or Klosterman. The cute guy who bought her painting earlier is at the show, and he tells Aiden that personally, he sees “less abstract and more realism” in her current work, which appears to be exclusively still lifes of flowers, and Aiden is like, “yes?” The guy finally introduces himself, his name is Paul Rogers, and attempts to ask Aiden out for a drink, or coffee, or if she doesn’t ingest liquids, they can consume large quantities of solid matter. Come on Paul, stretching sentences far past their logical conclusion is my beat. Knock it off. Aiden finally says that she’ll go out with him. What an eventful night for Aiden!
It’s also an eventful night for the E-Lator, which has not only matched Aiden’s teenage painting to the new one, the dying peonies, but also traced its location to Aiden’s loft. Detective Page is waiting for Aiden there, and he runs Paul’s plate when he drops Aiden off and gets a promise of dinner tomorrow but not a smooch. After Paul leaves, Page strolls up to Aiden’s door and is like, “hey we figured out where you are, just like the stalker could, not that the police are stalking you or anything, hello, I am at your door.” Aiden lets Page in and he tells her that they’re going to have someone stationed outside her loft all the time. They’re gonna get the stalker now, for sure! It’s been thirteen years and all it took to get this investigation going again was someone literally just putting her name into “Popular Pals.” Cops are great. Aiden goes to bed with her loaded gun under her pillow, because cops are great.
So now that the stalker knows where Aiden lives, he can do things like unlock her doors remotely (absolutely not), turn her electricity on and off, and then pretend to work for the power company so the super will let him in to “work” “on” the “power.” He sets up a bunch of cameras around her loft, and also strokes her paintings and lies down in her bed and it’s very gross. Also, is this one of those Lifetime movies where all the suspense would drain right out of it if the camera angled up a few degrees? Yes. It is.
Aiden goes on her dinner date with Paul, and she tries to act like a normal person while he tells her that he works from a home office in his basement. Basement? Or Lair? We’ll find out, because Jack is running a background check on Paul, during the date. Could he have done this earlier? Yeah probably. Maybe the cybercrimetics market is a real bear. Paul orders black coffee with a lemon wedge, and Aiden orders “the same” and they should probably go ahead and get married, because what are the odds that two people would enjoy this same weirdo coffee affectation? But before she can enjoy her demented beverage, Aiden gets a call from Page, who tells her that the background check showed that Paul lived in Aiden’s town when her parents were killed, and he has an assault charge on his record. He could be the guy! Stay calm but get out of there! She hides from Paul in the bathroom and has a little panic attack in there until Page comes to pick her up, with his gun drawn, in the restaurant. This all seems really reasonable. Page takes Aiden home and tells her that he’ll be outside her door all night. Aiden asks him where his wife is, and he replies that she left him and took their daughter, which was fair. Aiden locks her doors and windows but the stalker is watching her from those cameras he installed, so whatever.
In the morning, Aiden calls her therapist friend Jill to tell her that Paul probably killed her parents, based on the extremely thin gruel of “he lived in the same town as her, and he has one (1) assault charge on his record, plus a cop said it so it must be true.” The stalker listens in on their conversation (how? who cares, it’s cyberstalking, babyyyy), and, deducing that Jill is a therapist, books an appointment with her. Jill tells her to channel her terror and sadness into her art (which, again, is paintings of flowers), and to let the police do their job. Ha ha, ha ha! Jill should try an open mic night.
Paul shows up at Aiden’s gallery, only for Page to body-slam him into the door while demanding to know WHERE HE WAS on September 3, 1999. Like most normal people, Paul has no idea what he was doing on a random night thirteen years ago, and he finally remembers that he was backpacking in Europe that summer. He would. He also explains the assault charge away: he was trying to stop some guy from beating up on his girlfriend, and the girlfriend panicked and pressed charges against Paul, only to have them dropped two days later. Page calls Jack Cybercrimetics Dayton and asks him to check Paul’s passport and record again and guess what, this is all true! Page yells at Paul that he’s free to go and yells at him some more when Paul asks if Aiden is going to be okay. So, to recap, Page caused a stalking victim whose parents were murdered to have a panic attack in a restaurant bathroom, assaulted a completely innocent man, and yelled at him like it was his fault he didn’t murder anyone. ACAB forever, good lord. Also, Aiden was watching this from inside the gallery, so her trust in Page is at an all-time high.
I guess she trusts him enough to keep letting him into her Artist’s Loft though, because they go back there to talk about who the stalker could be if it’s not Paul. Winton maybe? Aiden is pretty sure it isn’t, but why not continue discounting her thoughts and experiences, it’s gotten them this far. She calls Paul to apologize for running out on their date and asks for another chance, to which he agrees. The stalker, who of course has been watching and listening to the call, flies into a rage in his Lair, slamming his laptop against the wall and screaming. A neighbor comes over to see what the fuck is up, and when the stalker sees that he has 911 pulled up on his phone, he snaps his neck, easy peasy. I wonder how easy it is to snap someone’s neck like that, but it also seems like a thing I shouldn’t have in my search history. There are zero consequences for murdering this man though, because the stalker just leaves the Lair and moves into the Artist’s Loft next to Aiden.
At the cop place, Mr. Cybercrimetics tells Page and Bonham (ugh!!) that they finally got the local PD to check out the IP address they traced from the Popular Pals message, and it had been recently vacated in a hurry, with the hard drives left but smashed. But! There was a post-it note under the desk, with a number on it that matches Winton’s bank account. Page goes to the gallery to ask Winton about it, and his line of questioning boils down to, “hey, Aiden’s great! You fuckin’ her?” and Winton is like, well, no, I am not, for several reasons, and also he doesn’t know why the business account he and Aiden share would be overdrawn, with the money dumped into Winton’s own personal account. He asks if Page is going to arrest him for embezzlement, and Page replies that he’d rather get him for murder. This is like the third season of Veronica Mars, where Veronica just could not stop accusing people of crimes they absolutely had not committed, except that Veronica Mars was much more charming and sympathetic than this incompetent Philadelphia police officer.
Aiden and Paul sit in her living room and eat Chinese food out of white paper boxes, using chopsticks, because this is a movie. They chat and flirt and even smooch, a big deal for Aiden, but then she gets a call from her friend Jill. She has this new client, and it’s the weirdest thing: he told her Aiden’s exact life story as though it was his own. That’s fucked up, right? Aiden agrees that it is fucked up, but the stalker, who is not only listening to the conversation but has triangulated Jill’s exact location and is watching her from traffic cameras as she walks down the street, thinks it’s a really good strategy for….something. Unclear. Actually you know what, he’s done with Jill, because he has hacked into the traffic signals and changed them to give Jill a “walk” signal when the light is red, and Jill, who is VERY busy and who has NEVER crossed a street before, immediately gets hit by a truck. “Well, that worked out nicely,” says the stalker, in his Lair. I’m honestly not 100% sure why Jill had to die, but it did work out nicely.
Aiden calls Page to tell him about Jill’s new client, and he tells her Jill is dead. Whenever anyone dies in the city of Philadelphia, Page knows about it, he’s like one of those people in the tubs in Minority Report, a movie I have not seen. Also, Page has Winton in custody, so Aiden meets with him in an interrogation room. He swears he didn’t steal her money, and he absolutely did not murder her parents. Look at how shiny and pink his shirt is! Would a murderer wear a shirt this pink and shiny? Aiden tells Page and Jack that she truly does not think Winton did anything to hurt her, and they don’t have any physical evidence tying him to anything. Jack suggests there’s someone else in her life she doesn’t know as well as she thinks, and she suggests that they have absolutely no idea what they’re doing, and leaves. This movie sure is taking up a lot of time on the cop side of things, considering that they have done not one useful thing the entire time. I choose to read this as an anti-police movie. Why not. I deserve a treat.
Paul takes Aiden home from the police station and asks if he’d like her to stay over. He can work from his laptop, he has a business call “with Taiwan” later. “So your computer is like a phone?” asks Aiden. Y……..es. She goes to bed, and Paul does his Business With Taiwan with headphones on, and is thus too busy to notice when someone unlocks the front door and saunters in. The stalker wanders around a bit, and although Aiden doesn’t wake in time to catch this person and see his face, which we the viewer could also see if the camera were placed at a slightly different angle, she does wake up eventually. She freaks out, but she thinks she’s just paranoid, so she tells Paul that she wasn’t ready to have someone over after all, and he leaves. But the stalker! He’s still here! Isn’t someone supposed to be watching Aiden’s front door all the time? Like, even if the stalker lives next door now, he still came in the front door.
Paul doesn’t have to sleep like normal people, so he’s up bright and early because Detective Page texted him to meet him in a parking garage somewhere. Reputable meetings always take place in parking garages. Shockingly, it wasn’t actually Page texting him, and a guy on a motorcycle chases Paul off the roof of the parking garage. He’s alive but badly injured in a very photogenic way. Blood glistening on his intact forehead and so on. When Aiden comes to the hospital to visit him, Page is there, for some reason, and he tells her that Paul just had an accident. Aiden does not believe that for a second, and also points out that obviously Paul didn’t kill her parents, and Winton isn’t doing this from jail, so maybe Page could stop fucking up for like five minutes? She goes into Paul’s room to check on him, and he wakes up just enough to tell her to check the texts on his phone, that Page did this to him. Aiden calls Cybercrimetics Levy to ask him to meet her in her Artist’s Loft tonight, while Page lurks outside Paul’s door. The movie seems to want us to think that Page might be the stalker, but it also showed us a scene of the stalker in his Lair watching Aiden and Page talking, so it is not doing a very good job.
Jack presents himself at Aiden’s and shows her Page’s hard drive, which is full of Aiden stuff. She tells Jack that Paul said Page attacked him, and Jack points out that Page was the first responder on the scene when her parents were killed, and the first one on the case when they started filing reports about her stalker. Why would he stay with the case so long, even after it cost him his wife and kid? Was he honestly working on this one case the whole time? And all it took to shake her out was putting her name into the fake Facebook and calling Dan Levy? Wow I do not respect the Philadelphia police force. Okay, yes, Jack is telling her that Page is the stalker. Which we know he’s not, but the movie thinks that we might think he is. I am very annoyed and somewhat confused, and Aiden is with me, wondering why Page never killed her when he had so many chances. Jack muses that maybe he viewed himself as her protector, and that a man who has nothing is a very dangerous animal. He continues browsing the Aiden stuff on Page’s hard drive and tells her she’s very talented, and then he quotes van Gogh to her and says an extremely weird thing about how they’re both trapped in their own ways. Aiden by her stalker, and him, “bound to a chair” (YUCK).
Paul wakes up and tries to call Aiden but her phone is out. Uh oh! Outside Aiden’s Artist’s Loft, Page tells Bonham that he’s going to go check on Aiden. As Page walks across the street, Jack pulls up a bunch of pictures of schoolgirl Aiden, with the green streaks in her hair, and tells her that in some cases, the stalking victim actually connects with their pursuer. Hmm! Page knocks at the door and when Aiden tells him she’s meeting with Jack, he tells her that Jack never came in the front gate. Hmmm, uhhh ohhhh! And then Jack GETS OUT OF HIS WHEELCHAIR and TASES AIDEN because yes, you guessed it, he’s the stalker, and he’s been faking??? his disability?????? Jack lets Page in just to tase him too, and grabs his gun. Aiden’s up now, and she logs into Paul’s Skype-type app and dials 911. Can you Skype 911? No, I just looked it up, you cannot Skype 911. It doesn’t matter. She runs upstairs to her room while Jack kills the electricity in the house again, who knows why really, the laptop has batteries and Aiden knows the layout of her own house. Jack comes up the stairs talking about van Gogh again, and how the woman he cut his ear off for didn’t even appreciate his sacrifice. All girls know how to do is not appreciate receiving ears in the mail and lie. Why can’t Aiden love him, it’s all he’s ever asked of her! Aiden opens her bedroom door and sweetly says she wants that more than anything, and Jack says he’d kill himself for her. “Please do,” Aiden replies, and then brains him with the laptop. She’s got weak little baby arms though, and he runs back down the stairs. OH hey Paul is here! Just in time for Jack to shoot him in the shoulder. Aiden tells Jack that actually, she’d rather die than be with him, and he raises the gun at her, but guess what, Page is conscious again and he’s got a little gun strapped to his ankle. He shoots Jack right in his stalker heart. You see, it’s symbolic, he had a bad sick heart and now it’s got a bullet in it.
SIX MONTHS LATER, at the gallery, Aiden bids a fond farewell to Winton. He’s so happy for her but he’ll miss her so much! They hug, and then Paul comes to take her to the airport. They’re going to Paris! Aiden is living her life! But then there’s a little stinger where a security camera is watching them, and I don’t know, I feel like actually the gallery probably just has a security camera for non-stalker reasons? It’s fine. Roll end credits! Dan Levy is credited as “Jack Dayton/Unknown Man” which, you guys, you did not have to do that. I put it together. I understand that he was the stalker. Thank you. And thank you for reading! Subscribe if you want, like I said, I will be sending out another little thing about this movie because I have Thoughts about the big ol reveal. I really really appreciate your shares and support!