The film was Kept Woman, whose subject matter I had no idea of and wasn’t able to find out because there wasn’t a clickable link on the title on the Lifetime Web site, though given how many films they’ve been showing lately on the theme of hot young women in more or less exploitative relationships with older and considerably richer men I had assumed the title was “kept” in the Easiest Way sense of a man-mistress relationship. No, it turned out this movie, directed by Michel Poulette (“it was directed by a little chicken?” I couldn’t resist joking) from a script by Doug Barber and James Taylor Phillips, was literally about a woman being “kept” — i.e., kidnapped and held in a crazy man’s basement against her will. The woman is Jessica Crowder (Courtney Ford), who lives with her fiancé Evan (Andrew W. Walker, younger and considerably cuter than the common run of Lifetime leading men) in a New York City apartment until they come home from a night on the town and find their apartment has been burglarized. Worse yet, the burglar (Matt Enos) is still there and forces them at gunpoint to give up the cash they have on hand, the engagement ring Evan gave Jessica and the contents of Jessica’s purse. Feeling so violated she can never be at ease in that apartment again, Jessica insists that she and Evan move — only, this being a Lifetime movie, they’re going from the proverbial frying pan into the fire. The fire is Simon (marvelously portrayed by Shaun Benson, who pulls off the difficult challenge in playing a crazy man to make the audience believes that he thinks he’s not only normal but perfectly sane), the supercilious next-door neighbor who looks harmless enough — he’s a scrawny little thing wearing glasses and a neatly trimmed beard and effecting a milquetoast manner. He says he’s a professor of “men’s studies” at a local university — actually the name of the course he teaches is “Men and Masculinities” (“You mean there’s more than one?” asks the innocent Jessica, obviously not familiar with academic Newspeak) — and he lives alone even though Jessica and/or Evan notice that he’s coming home from the grocery store with enough food for at least two people.
Simon reaches out to Evan and Jessica by presenting them a bottle of wine from
his cellar — the label on the bottle is “Chateau Poulette,” an in-joke on the
director’s name — and it’s only until half an hour into the movie that his real
agenda is revealed. (Actually it’s revealed in the promo they showed just
before the movie begins, creating essentially a built-in spoiler.) Simon is a
retro guy who believes that a man should be the master of his own house and his
women should be subservient to him, and since he can’t get any women to behave
that way in 2015 if he meets and courts them in the normal fashion, he’s taken
to kidnapping them and holding them in his basement, with a security code on
the door (which he changes often) and a full 1950’s décor in the living room and kitchen he’s set up so the
women he’s kidnapped can cook for him, fuss over him, dress in 1950’s
housewife’s clothes and, of course, give him sex without resistance any time he
wants it. He’s got his house wired with state-of-the-art 21st
century surveillance cameras but, true to form, he watches the output from
these videos on an old-fashioned 1950’s black-and-white TV. He has at least one
other victim, Robin Simmons (Rachel Wilson), a former graduate student (Charles
wondered why a men’s studies professor would have a female graduate student, and I thought that was a
clue Barber and Phillips had planted in his script that would start getting
Evan and the other characters wise to Simon when they realized the inconsistency) whom he started an
affair with while she was still his student, coaxed into the basement and now has
a big-time case of the Stockholm Syndrome, totally identifying with Evan and his needs and coaxing
Jessica to accept that from now on Simon and that basement are going to be her life. She even stops Jessica from
attacking Simon in one quite well-done and gripping scene. Simon forces Jessica
to give him her e-mail address and password so he can write Evan an e-mail,
ostensibly from her, stating that she’s found a better man and has left Evan
for him — which Evan doesn’t believe because Jessica left without taking her
cell phone and she would never
leave home voluntarily without her phone.
Evan has help tracing Jessica from
two unlikely sources. One is Oscar Garrett (Jesse Camacho), a heavy-set, queeny
and gender-ambiguous person with whom Jessica had maintained contact via
computer because they were both interested in investigating missing-person
cases, and to whom in their last contact Jessica had let slip her suspicions
about Simon and his intentions — Oscar offered to investigate Simon for
Jessica, but alas she didn’t take him up on it. The other is Tyler Haynes (Troy
Blundell), a police officer (in what jurisdiction, one wonders?) who’s a friend
of Evan’s (and who’s played by an actor who, to my mind, is even hunkier than
Andrew W. Walker — this is certainly the movie to watch if you’re as upset at I
am by the deficient beefcake quotas of recent Lifetime films compared to the
procession of hot guys they used
to show in the 1990’s!), who interviewed Oscar as part of his initial
investigation into Jessica’s disappearance and received from Oscar a full
dossier on Simon, including that he was fired from a previous teaching job in
Connecticut for inappropriate sexual contact with a student but was allowed to
resign rather than put the school through the embarrassment of firing him. The
student he was fired for having inappropriate sexual contact with was Robin
Simmons — and there was an earlier incident in which he also had sex with a student who subsequently disappeared;
her name was Megan, and we’ve already been told in previous dialogue between
Simon and Jessica that he murdered her when she got out of line. While Jessica
is down in the basement with Simon, Robin, who for all her identification with
Simon gets downright jealous the first night Simon decides he wants Jessica for
sex instead of her, says to him that Jessica is only pretending to be in love
with him and she’s really still in love with Evan and anxious to escape. Simon
responds by murdering … Robin, whom he’s convinced is lying out of jealousy and
he insists he won’t tolerate lies. Officer Tyler comes out to Simon’s case to
ask about the items in Oscar’s dossier, and Simon responds by being polite
until Tyler turns his back, whereupon Simon clubs him twice with a cast-iron
frying pan, killing him.
Then there’s a suspense climax in which Evan breaks
into Simon’s house, Jessica figures out the combination to the security lock by
seeing Simon’s bloody fingers on certain of the keys, the three of them
confront each other in the upstairs part of the house, Jessica raises a fire
extinguisher about to club … and then there’s a commercial break, after which
we see Jessica in jail and we immediately assume she had genuinely fallen in love with Simon and had killed
Evan to stay with him. Only it turns out she’s not an inmate, just a visitor,
and she’s there to torment Simon, rubbing it in that because he didn’t get the
death penalty he’ll be imprisoned for the rest of his life the way he was
hoping to do with her, and also showing her the book she’s just written (called
Kept Women — plural) about her
experience in his basement. Kept Woman could have been considerably better but even as it is it’s better than
the common run of Lifetime movies; director Poulette and editor Benjamin
Duffield do some marvelous suspense cutting, and Poulette also gets a marvelous
performance out of Shaun Benson as the crazy Simon, properly edgy but also nice
enough you can readily understand how he was able to trick those women into
coming into his basement, while at the same time his idea of male-female
relationships is stuck in the 1950’s and it’s clear that’s why he commits his crimes. I’d still love to see someone
make a movie of Emma Donoghue’s Room
sometime — it strikes me as the best of these woman-held-captive-by-a-sex-fiend
stories and it’s intriguingly told from the point of view of the child she has
by her captor, who literally has
known no other environment than the room in the shed in which he held them
since he was born there (home-delivered by his mom without anyone else’s
knowledge or help, since a previous pregnancy ended in disaster when the captor
tried to help deliver the baby and failed miserably, causing its death) and has
never been outside (and when I
looked Donoghue up on Wikipedia I wasn’t at all surprised to find she’s a
Lesbian, given the quite sour view of men and heterosexuality in her book) —
but Kept Woman is actually a
pretty good one, maybe not in absolute standards but quite a bit better than
the common run of “pussies-in-peril” movies from Lifetime.
