KILLER SINGLE DAD: DTMWaGL #21
Lockpicking: The Movie
Hello friends! We have made it to the end of the year, and here I am, still writing about Lifetime movies. And here you are, still reading about them! I thought about covering a Lifetime Christmas movie, the kind where it’s always lightly snowing and everyone is wearing chunky knitwear and meeting cute and nobody gets murdered, but that’s just not me. I don’t have it in me to make fun of people who are just trying to find love in this godforsaken world. Instead, I watched a movie about a guy kidnapping babies to compensate for his life’s defining tragedy. Happy holidays! (Content warnings for murder, stalking, kidnapping, a pregnant woman in peril, and off-screen car crash and child death.)
Right off the bat, we get a baby kidnapping scene. A guy sneaks into a house and sneaks out with an tiny girl, telling her “it’s okay, Daddy’s here.” The baby’s mother fails to stop the guy even though he is walking at a calm and normal pace and she is not incapacitated in any way. This is why you shouldn’t have a big house, there’s too much room for kidnappers to navigate in there. The kidnapper drives off with the baby. I personally would not consider “The Wheels on the Bus” to be classic getaway music, but this fella thinks outside the box.
Now the kidnapper (his name is Garrett, it takes them forever to say this) is doing the dishes in a nice kitchen, cheerfully watching over his children playing in the backyard, except that no he isn’t, the children are a hallucination. The dishes are real, though. He’s interrupted by a visitor, a nice old British lady named Olivia, who’s here about a nanny job. He talks to her for about thirty seconds before deciding to entrust her with “his” baby “daughter,” fifteen-month-old Laura. Americans will trust anyone with a British accent. They agree that she’ll be paid in cash under the table, and she agrees that she will stay the fuck out of his office. You hear me Olivia, stay the fuck out of my office.
Turns out Garrett has a lot going on in his office! Like a map with the names “Beth Morgan” and “Jennifer Monroe” pinned to Arizona and San Diego respectively, and house plans, and hallucinated children that he chats with. He drives to Jennifer Monroe’s house and sees her inside, very pregnant and crying while her husband confesses that he cheated on her, again. Oh hell yeah, we’ve got kidnapping, we’ve got labor law violations, and now we’ve got infidelity. The trifecta! He hangs out in the bushes while the cheater leaves, and then late that night breaks into the house and wanders around, peeking at the unfinished nursery, and hiding when he hears Jennifer painfully walking down the stairs. She makes it to the bottom and passes out, bleeding between her legs. Oh no! Garrett decides that he’s a man of action, and calls 911, telling them he heard a loud argument and then saw a woman bleeding on the floor, which is….kind of true. He hangs up without leaving a name, and takes off.
A doctor tells Jennifer she’s fine, and her baby is fine, but that the premature dilation she experienced was probably due to extreme stress, so she really needs to take it easy. Jen’s husband Matt chooses this moment to wander into the hospital room, and is immediately told to leave by both Jen and her friend Karen (!!). No stress! No explanations about how he’s really sorry! Go away! This isn’t about you, Matt! GOD. After she’s discharged, Jen sits at home telling Karen that she’s still confused about who called 911, and why the door was unlocked when the paramedics got there. Karen somehow makes this horny, and then suggests that Jen’s recently retired cop dad can probably figure out who called 911 and go from there. This is the only cop in the story. He’s fine. It’s fine.
Home from lurking outside Jennifer’s hospital room, Garrett hangs out in his office, doing regular work-from-home stuff like reading a baby’s Facebook page, flipping through fertility clinic records, and talking to his hallucinated children. He’s interrupted by Olivia, who is at the office door both to eavesdrop and to tell him that he has a visitor. It’s Jennifer! She’s there to thank him for saving her and her son’s life. He invites her in and tells her that he was in her neighborhood to check out a house for rent across the street, and, well, he got to save her life along the way. What a treat. Threatening music swells as she offers to buy him lunch, and I think the threat is that she’s allowing this dangerous person into her life, but it does seem like maybe Jennifer is going to poison Garrett.
At a cafe that Jennifer and her friend Karen own (this is the only mention of what Jen does other than be pregnant, for the whole movie), Jen asks Garrett when he’s moving to the neighborhood, and he replies, “well, my wife and two of my children died in a car accident.” Okay, number one, that’s not really an answer, and number two, is Garrett a dark timeline version of Joe Biden? Or is Joe Biden already the dark timeline version of Joe Biden. Much to think about. Anyway, Garrett says that his two other kids need him more than ever, but he’s only taking care of his oldest surviving daughter Laura at the moment; Maddie, an even tinier baby, is with family. Jen continues to convince him to move in across the street, and apparently it works, because he goes home and tells the nanny to start packing, they’re moving. Olivia protests that children need stability and he pretty much threatens to call ICE on her. Garrett doesn’t quite grasp how conversations or consequences are supposed to work, but he’s pretty sure he’s the one with the upper hand here.
The next time Garrett leaves the house, Olivia picks the lock to his office and sees the maps and fertility clinic records and also a document naming David Miller the beneficiary of Lisa Miller’s $500,000 life insurance policy. Curious! Before she can be too curious, Garrett returns home and she scurries out, but Garrett finds the hairpin she used in the lock. Olivia is fired and if she tries to say anything to anyone about what she saw in there, he will definitely call ICE on this elderly Englishwoman and they’ll have to take time off from their regular horrific abuse to do something about it.
Garrett drops in on Jen and her dad (he’s the man of the house now) to tell her that he signed a lease on the house across the street, and he’ll be popping by to help finish setting up the baby’s room. “How did you know it wasn’t finished?” asks Jen, and Garrett is like, “ha ha because that’s how it was with my kids, I definitely have never broken into your house!” Jen’s husband Matt also drops by and thanks Garrett for calling 911, and also for all those hours he was questioned by the police for assaulting his wife, which he did not do. Matt sucks but he’s not wrong, but everybody bullies him out of the house. Even the fetus!
True to his word, Garrett helps Jen put together a crib and also sets up a fancy wifi video baby monitor he very altruistically got her. She’s going to be watching baby Laura while he goes to pick up his other daughter. I certainly hope he won’t be kidnapping anyone!
Oh, no, he pulls up to Beth Morgan’s extremely cute Arizona house with an empty carseat and stares at her and her infant daughter. My hopes were in vain. At midnight, Garrett picks the lock and sidles into the nursery, and after a little back-and-forth hijinx, he picks up baby Chelsea and makes a very calm and measured break for it. He’s not going to run while holding a baby. Beth pleads with him to give her baby back, and says that Chelsea’s father will be home any minute. Garrett replies, “but her father is already here!” and then decides he has to murder her and burn her house down because she’s seen his face. Finally, the title makes sense. “Kidnapper Single Dad” doesn’t hit the same.
Garrett returns to Jen’s house to pick up Laura, with “his” “infant” “daughter” “Maddie” in tow. No, wait, she is an actual three-month-old infant, but the rest of the quote marks stand. He offers to go to Jen’s Lamaze class so that her dad doesn’t have to sit on the ground with his bad back. Is there anything this guy won’t do? What a sweetheart.
At the Lamaze class, Matt, who has googled things like “Garrett Penderson tragedy” and “Garrett Penderson car accident” and come up empty, confronts Jen and Garrett about like, what Garrett’s whole deal is. Is he lying about his family being killed? Is he trying to get in Jen’s belly-banded pants? Like, what is the whole deal here? Garrett smoothly replies that his name isn’t in any news accounts of the accident because he asked the authorities to keep it out, so that his surviving children wouldn’t grow up with that looming over them (that is, fun fact, not how that works), and that he’s not on social media because he’s not trying to get attention from other women, Matt. Jen decides this all checks out and tells Matt, again, to leave. I am fascinated by this unfaithful husband who is actually correct about pretty much everything, what an interesting choice for a Lifetime movie to make! Jen gets to choose between a killer single dad and a husband who simply cannot stop cheating on her but misses her and wants to be a good dad to their baby, and also she has one of those relationships with her dad where they seem like an old married couple. What a life! USA! USA! USA!
After class, Garrett tells Jennifer that he’d like to meet with Matt man-to-man to patch things up. Jen reluctantly agrees, and Matt heads to Garrett’s house to definitely not get murdered. Garrett hands Matt a beer but doesn’t open it (rude!!!) and tells him that they just got off on the wrong foot. If the two of them can make amends, he’d be happy to put in a good word with Jen. Matt isn’t buying it, so Garrett takes a different tack: doesn’t it eat away at him, knowing that the baby in Jen’s belly isn’t really his? That he can’t give any woman what they all really want? That he isn’t truly a man at all? Matt’s had enough of this, handing his beer back to Garrett and turning to leave, whereupon Garrett promptly smashes the beer bottle over his own head and slams his face into a mirror, screaming like Matt is attacking him all the while. Jen and her dad hear the screams and rush over to find Garrett, “unconscious” and bleeding on the floor. This is a more wrong foot than before. Matt ends up in jail, and tries to tell Jen that he didn’t hurt Garrett, he did it to himself, and swears on his son’s life that he’s telling the truth, but Jen tells him they’re done. She’s said that a lot though.
Garrett, hanging out at Jen’s house with a big bandage on his head, researches ways to induce labor, settling on raspberry leaf tea. Karen is also hanging out at Jen’s house, because the movie has just remembered that they are best friends. Jen can’t believe that Matt would attack Garrett, and Karen muses that jealousy can do strange things to a man. Jen is like, “jealous???? of my extremely sexless Ken doll friend Garrett???????” and then drinks some Special Tea her sexless friend gives her. It tastes bad!
Back in his own office, Garrett writes “Connor arrives!” on Jen’s due date, which is the same as Animal Crossing: New Horizons, has a chat with his tulpa son, and then hears a knock at his door. It’s Olivia! Hi, Olivia! She has seen a news story about a murdered woman and a missing baby, and some things about her weird former employer have started to fall into place for her. “Oh, don’t bother with another lie, we both have better things to do with our time,” Olivia crisply assures him. Olivia is a Ruth Rendell character. She also knows that his real name isn’t Garrett Penderwhatever, it’s David Miller, the name she saw on the insurance policy, and that he has that $500,000 somewhere, so she will be blackmailing him now, thank you very much. You can probably guess what happens next, because the movie isn’t called BLACKMAILED SINGLE DAD, and Garrett buries Olivia in a shallow grave while both the babies he’s kidnapped cry in the minivan. That is a long day for a baby!
Matt is abruptly served with a restraining order from Garrett, the terms of which are broad enough that technically Matt can’t go visit Jen, across the street, where he still legally resides. I’m just a simple country recapper, but that doesn’t seem plausible? Maybe the justice system moves different when a white man wants something. Ha ha! Matt calls his wife to complain about the restraining order, and also asks why she told him that they had to use donor sperm to get her pregnant, because how else would Garrett know about that. Jen swears that she didn’t tell him, and Matt is like, oh my GOD how many different ways do you have to learn that this dude is shady as hell, and finally, f i n a l l y, Jen has some flashbacks to all the weird things Garrett has said and done that didn’t quite add up. It’s so many! So she asks Garrett to go to the store for her, she’s pregnant and all, so she can go snoop in his house.
Jen picks the lock on Garrett’s door and heads in. Everyone in this movie is so good at picking locks! Why even bother locking anything! Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to her, when Jen enters his office, it triggers an alert on Garrett’s phone from a security camera. Jen still has some time to snoop around, finding the calendar with her due date circled, and pulling up Garrett’s browser history. All Garrett ever looks at online is news stories about his many crimes! Someone tell this man about Tumblr or something. Oh no wait, do NOT tell him about Tumblr, we do not need this man at the center of sperm donation discourse. Anyway, long story short, Garrett was a donor at a fertility clinic and now he’s collecting the children that resulted from his donations. Had you put this together yet? It was in the two-line synopsis of the movie but here it is treated as a revelation. Garrett shows up at Jen’s house and whacks her dad on the noggin. Poor guy.
Jennifer, who is having some labor pains now, hightails it out of Garrett’s house and calls Matt to tell him that he was right, Garrett is dangerous, and that she’s pretty sure he’s the donor for their kid. He tells her he’ll be there in half an hour and that he loves her, and Jen gets back into her house just in time to get a call from Garrett. When she turns around and realizes the call is coming from inside the house, he holds up his phone and says, “we can probably hang up now,” which is pretty funny. No need to waste your battery, he’s here to steal your baby and murder you in person! Garrett patiently explains his plans and motivations to Jennifer: when his wife and children were killed in a car crash, he felt like he’d lost everything and he’d never have another family. Then he remembered that he’d been a sperm donor in college. Bing bang boom, instant family, with just a nominal amount of kidnapping and murder up front! Having set that up, he knocks Jen out with a blackjack he probably sent away for, and crams her in his trunk, with the babies in the backseat.
Matt arrives at Jen’s house to find her gone, and Jen’s dad woozily tells him that Garrett probably took her to his old house, get the address off her phone. And, indeed, Jen wakes up in Garrett’s old house, tied to a bed and prepped for a good old-fashioned home birth. Garrett eagerly tells her that he’s watched every home birth video on the internet, and there are a lot of them, so he’s really confident that he can do this without losing another child. And in case anything goes wrong, he’s got: a big knife! And a speculum! Yes, that covers every possible outcome. And then, schloop, out comes Jen’s baby. Garrett cuts the cord and swaddles Connor without letting Jen see him, and then informs her that he’ll just let her bleed out and die here, while he goes to his new house in Mexico. He has one of those, apparently! And in Mexico, surely, no one will be like, “so, okay, you have a brand-new infant, a three-month-old, and a one-year-old, and your wife and your other children died….three months ago? I guess? Did this timeline make sense before you had the newborn? I don’t know. I thought you were lying about the dead wife and children but I guess not?”
Matt arrives at the house where his wife just gave birth to his child, and is immediately knocked unconscious by Garrett. Man! You cheat on your wife one or several times, and you just can’t catch a break. Luckily, Jen has worked herself out of her restraints and stumbles to the kitchen, with the big knife, to pick up her baby. Garrett comes in the front door ready to take the newborn back, and Jen hisses, “go to hell,” at him. “I’ve been there, and I’m not going back,” Garrett tells her, only to get absolutely full-on stabbed in the chest once he takes a step toward Jen. Wow!! Jen!! This lady gave birth five minutes ago and she’s already killed to protect her child! This is advanced motherhood. As Garrett dies on the hardwood floor, his ghost children come to him so they can play forever. They run and hug and play and laugh and it’s extremely weird. I’m glad he’s happy now?
The movie ends with a short scene of Jennifer and Matt playing with their baby. I could have assumed they would be doing that, but it’s nice to see, I guess. And that’s it! The other babies are fine, don’t worry about them, and Garrett’s ghost children are even better. His ghost wife? Where’s she, you ask? Oh, she’s in uhhhhh Canada. Canada Heaven. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Thanks for reading, and as always, tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell your mailman, tell everybody. Subscribe for more, I send out bonus content like extra little musings that don’t quite fit in the full recaps, and also, an entire review of the Jaden Smith/Cara Delevingne weepie LIFE IN A YEAR that I sincerely believe to be the longest and most detailed thing that anyone, anywhere has written about it. It was pretty good and it destroyed my sanity so if you want to read that, subscribe for full access to the archives. Okay, thanks bye happy New Year!