FAMILY OF LIES

Hello friends! You have only yourselves to blame for this!

Today’s film is FAMILY OF LIES, about a family that lies. We open in medias res, because a Lifetime thriller loves an in medias res opening. Two teens and an adult woman run through the woods while another woman shoots at them. After splitting up, the teens are discovered by a man with a gun and scream, “EMILY!” and then the title screen shows up. It is admirably straightforward. Economical. Family of Lies.

Listen, I am not going to shell out for the Lifetime Movie Club subscription, so

We then jump back to “FOUR WEEKS EARLIER”. A dad is reading a bright red file marked “IPR” and looking very serious. I genuinely do not think he is ever given a name? He is Dad. Mom is outside talking to her adult daughter, Emily, about how Emily can’t find a job. Things are tough out there for a...unclear on what Emily does, but it’s tough out there for an Emily. She’s looking after her teen brother and sister, Ethan and Lexi, while their parents go away for a week on business (or….””””business”””””?). Mom and Dad pack some things, Dad looks at a handgun in a drawer, this is given some importance. A gun! As the dad pulls the Suburban out of the driveway, he says to Emily, “Don’t let them kill each other!” “Maybe I will!” Emily says, elaborately shrugging. It is kind of funny.

Immediately afterward, the Suburban is being CHASED down a country road by an old pickup truck with a fairly unusual paint job, and then RAMMED by an old pickup truck with a fairly unusual paint job, and then RUN OFF THE ROAD and INTO A TREE by an old pickup truck with a fairly unusual paint job. Also, despite the fact that the Suburban has Iowa plates, the tree they have crashed into is suuuper not a tree common in Iowa, where the vegetation has very little Spanish moss dripping from it. It looks like Georgia? South Carolina? (This is the analysis you signed up for, Lifetime Movie Tree Chat with Karen.) A man and woman emerge from the pickup truck and ask Mom and Dad, “WHERE IS IT,” while pointing guns at them. Mom and Dad don’t answer, so the pickup truck man covers the Suburban in gas and lights a cigarette. He holds it with his thumb and forefinger so you know he’s cool and threatening. Shots ring out and the Suburban is lit ablaze and shoved in a lake.

A cop comes to the house to tell Emily her parents are dead. Emily is not a good enough actress to carry this scene, so they do the thing where the music swells over where the dialogue would go. Emily goes to identify the bodies and her mascara is very cinematically dripping down her face, despite the fact that she was woken up by the cop. Wash your face before you go to bed, Emily.

You are going to get an eye infection, Emily.

They have the funeral, Mom and Dad’s coworker Ted gives them condolences. Hello, Ted. That night, the pickup truck with the fairly unusual paint job pulls up outside the house and the house alarm goes off, but Emily doesn’t see anyone. Home security is a bougie scam. Do not get a home security system.

The next day (??) Emily is informed by a detective that her parents didn’t really die in a car crash, they were murdered. “Someone wanted to make it look like an accident, it was elaborately planned and executed,” he tells her, but like: they immediately figured it out, the bodies had gunshot wounds, how elaborately planned was this really. Let me plan your murders, I will do a better job than these dinguses. He also shows her mugshots of “professional killers” who were “wanted by the FBI and spotted in town” and asks her if her parents had any enemies. They did not, says Emily, but what is this a family of? It is a family of lies. So.

Emily, who needs a job, is offered a job in Louisiana. She tells her brother and sister they’ll be moving, and they are mad about it, and Lexi says she has friends here, and Ethan says he does too, and Lexi says, “yeah DORK FRIENDS,” which is ruthless. I want to win the favor of Lexi. Anyway, they start packing. That night (????) the pickup truck comes back and also a shadowy figure knocks on the back door in the middle of the night. The cop who was supposed to be watching the house didn’t see anything, because this is one of the Lifetime movies where the cops are just beyond useless. Also, they have a ceiling fan on the back porch, which to me seems like an unspeakable luxury.

They move to Louisiana, to a house that does not have a ceiling fan on the back porch. It’s totally fine, this house, nice yard, wood floors, but my god the teens are bitchy about it. Emily starts work as an “analyst” doing “plant management” at a “research facility”. This is not one of the jobs usually available to Lifetime movie women (decorator, florist, nanny, teacher), so that’s nice. Her boss, Heather, introduces her to the facilities guy, Max, and her coworker, Shane. She takes note of Max’s sleeve tattoos and also the blandly acceptable attractiveness of Shane. That night (?????) she thinks she sees Max lurking outside her house, because only one person in Glen Oaks, Louisiana has sleeves. Then she sees on the news the next morning that Max was SHOT AND KILLED last night. Emily looks up Max’s Facebook (or analogue) and sees a picture of him with her dad, I guess. So she calls Ted, the guy from the funeral, and he tells her that her parents (of lies??) made “frequent business trips” to Louisiana, maybe they met there? He’ll look into it.

At cheer practice, Lexi thinks she sees someone watching her, and when she goes to where they were standing, she finds the necklace she gave her mom for her birthday. She shows it to her brother Ethan as they walk home, and the pickup truck is like RIGHT behind them. Please notice the pickup truck, someone in this movie, someone in this family of lies, PLEASE.

Ted calls Emily in the middle of the night to tell her that her folks were into some DANGEROUS STUFF and it goes back to when they were in the MILITARY (of lies) and maybe they never got OUT of the MILITARY and he is coming to see her, and then he hangs up his flip phone. Then we realize Emily is in her coworker Shane’s bed? Are they, like, fucking? Why are they doing that. Why is she leaving her teen siblings alone overnight, when she thinks someone is stalking them. Why. Bad family. Family of lies. Emily goes home and someone is lurking outside the house again, ho hum.

At work, Emily gets a bunch of emails from someone claiming to be her dad (or her dad of LIES) that tell her they have to meet immediately and that she is being traced. While she is freaking out about emails from her dead father, Shane is doing plant science chat in the background, and smiling a lot, more than someone doing plant science should be smiling tbh. The planet is dying, Shane. Anyway, Ted calls her from a sketchy hotel and she goes to meet him. The pickup truck? Oh you better believe it’s at the hotel. And then, wouldn’t you know it, somebody murders Ted.

Also, there are just a bunch of office chairs outside the hotel.

Emily finds Ted’s body and calls the cops. They ask how she knew Ted, and if she knew Ted wasn’t his real name. “What was his real name?” she asks, and the cop says, “If you don’t know, you don’t know.” Oh. Back at home, Emily looks through a box and says out loud, “WHERE is that HANDGUN,” and also finally tells her siblings that their parents were murdered.

The pickup truck is back on the street when Emily wakes from a nightmare and thinks she hears something. She sneaks around the house with a rifle for like a solid minute of screen time, then sees a shadow cross the bathroom window and shoots at it. This, to me, to Karen, seems like a bad idea, to just shoot at a shadow, but she misses. Also, is a rifle what you want for home protection? I genuinely do not know. Please tell me. Weigh in in the, the comments? Anyway, the cops come to the house (why do they keep calling the cops? The cops have done nothing, ACAB) and then Shane does too. Shane boards up a window and then tells Emily, “I boarded up a window.” You sure did, buddy. Ethan finds Shane sneaking around in the attic and asks him, “Are you my sister’s boyfriend?” “You’d have to ask her,” says Shane. There is literally zero chemistry between them so for Emily’s sake I hope the answer is no.

Emily goes to work at the “research facility” the next day, and Shane isn’t there, and something she dropped yesterday is still on the floor, which leads her to wonder what Shane did all day yesterday, which leads her to look at Shane’s desk, which is just full of blank paperwork and a phone that doesn’t connect to anything even though he was doing plant science chat on it. It’s all a fake! Or he is like really good at time theft. Is Shane doing praxis, or is Shane a bad guy? Time will tell! Also me! I will tell! Emily pokes her head into her boss Heather’s office. Heather is not there, but there is a file on her desk containing a life insurance policy for Emily (her email address is @colby.edu, fancy school you got there), with Heather listed as the beneficiary, and also stapled to this is a suicide note written by Emily, in which she apologizes for killing her siblings and herself and they’ll all be together. This is such a good file! It is a good thing Emily found it, just on the desk there, in the unlocked office! Then, gunshots ring out and Shane staggers into Heather’s office and dies. Emily grabs the gun Shane was holding, runs out of the building, and calls the police (you know what I think about this) and reports a murder at her office. When she gives the address, the cop says, “why no one’s been in that office in fiiiiiiiiifty yeaaaaaaaaars,” and then there’s a whooshing sound. Well no but he does say that’s a vacant building, there’s no research facility there.

Emily picks up Ethan and Lexi from school so they can get out of town. She has a bunch of flashbacks (there are a lot of flashbacks in this movie), and goes to look at the filing cabinet from her dad’s office, in the attic. Behind a false back, she finds the big red file her dad was looking at the day he got killed, and it looks, to me, very professional. Emily reads it aloud and realizes it’s about Heather, Shane, and Max, and something about life insurance.

American Typewriter is the most professional of fonts.

When Emily, Lexi, and Ethan attempt to leave their totally acceptable house, they are met by Emiliy’s boss Heather, and Heather’s gun. Heather very courteously takes the time to explain her entire dastardly plan, starting with the origin and moving up to the present day, but basically she’d been working at a drug company and taking out life insurance policies on people she knew were about to die, and Shane and Max had always been in on it with her, and when the company brought Emily’s parents in as “efficiency experts” (that’s what they were, like the Cheaper by the Dozen people), they figured it out. You would think that would be a job for an auditor. Not in this movie it is not. Also you would think th-- actually you know what, please do not spend more than twenty seconds thinking about the viability of this scheme. Anyway Heather tells Emily that it’s her parents’ fault she’s in danger, and that they were therefore bad parents. Rude. They scuffle for guns, and Emily gets her siblings away.

We are finally back at the first scene! It is four weeks later than when it was four weeks earlier! Just like before, Emily leaves the teens to find Heather, and the teens are found by a man with a gun. But this time, we see Emily shoot Heather (after she has some flashbacks, I truly cannot overstate how many flashbacks there are). Or maybe she doesn’t, because then Heather gets back up and attempts to shoot Emily but then! Heather is shot! Shot by whom? Why, shot by Emily’s mom! Who is alive! And also the dad is the man with the gun who found the teens!

Oh they were alive the whole time.

Okay. Okay! They were investigating Heather’s scheme (I guess they were? efficiency experts? after all???) but their friend Ted sold them out to Heather, who sent those hitmen after them to kill them and take The Evidence. Mom and Dad killed the hitmen (sure!) and then set the Suburban ablaze with their bodies inside it (sure!!) to buy themselves some time off the grid (sure!!!!). But don’t worry pumpkin, you were never alone, we were those people lurking outside your house and your cheer practice the whole time! Just lurking, like good parents do! Just getting shot at because they were passing by the bathroom window in the middle of the night! Also, Dad was the guy who killed Shane before he could kill Emily! I guess they were the people in the pickup truck?? The whole time?????

“What happens next?” asks Emily, which is a VERY reasonable question. “We start over, as a family,” says Dad, and then they hug, and then the movie is over.

So here are the questions I still have:

Were the parents efficiency experts or were they some sort of gun-toting corporate mercenaries? They sure did dispatch those “professional killers” real quick!

Is efficiency expert a real job?

Why did Emily sleep with Shane, a person of no particular charisma or attractiveness?

How, like, how did the parents think lurking around outside their house was a good and helpful thing to do?

Is it practical to have a ceiling fan on your porch in Iowa? It doesn’t seem practical, but?
Is this newsletter a good idea like, is it, really, why is it so long?

Okay. Thank you, and I am sorry but also, you're welcome.