User Reviews

"A Wife's Nightmare" is a very recent entry to Emmy-winning Vic Sarin's Nightmare movie series. However, it does really not become clear until almost the very end till we now why it says "Mom's" in the title. The movie runs slightly under 90 minutes as usual for these television films and the title character is played by Jennifer Beals. Thanks to "Flashdance" she is also easily the most known cast member, certainly the only star in here. However, I felt that all the other 3 major cast members played their parts as well and especially about Lola Tash we may hear a lot in the future. She plays a kind of Lolita character who her dad is attracted to, who kisses her brother and gets other boys have a crush on her.

And while I enjoyed the film overall, there are also weak aspects about it. In terms of a combination of script and acting, there are some bad moments here, such as when we see Beale's character's boss being angry at the failed presentation. Or the fight between the 2 school boys at the end. Honestly, they messed up a bit every time it went really dramatic. Possibly the worst aspect here was the soundtrack who made this Canadian movie look pretty amateurish at times. It is all quantity over quality with extremely dramatic music in fairly uninteresting sequences even.

I personally would have liked another outcome if we actually got to witness it all being misunderstood by the main character, which would actually have been credible with her history of mental health problems. Instead they offered us a story-line which wasn't too convincing with an upcoming divorce coming pretty much out of nowhere. This film has some flaws no doubt about it, but for a lifetime movie it's all okay. You cannot expect something epic here, but overall I give this one a thumbs up and no denying Lola Tash is extremely stunning.

I decided to watch this because I'm a fan of Jennifer Beals. The acting was fine, although the story wasn't entirely original. There are several movies out there with the "husband or wife is having an affair when will they be caught?" premise, and many of those other movies do it with more suspense.

What I liked about this story was (spoiler) Caitlin isn't the long lost daughter, but the mistress. The daughter angle was new to me, and added a little bit of suspense to some of the other interactions in the movie. But I felt like some of the dialogue made the "twist" too obvious too early and the rest of the movie suffered for it.

Overall it's a slightly above average TV movie and if you have some time to kill I'd recommend it.

Oh my God what a lame and poorly executed piece of trash this is. Believe me when I tell you that this review will concisely and accurately detail the mess that this show is and if you still decide to watch it, then I accept no responsibility for your inevitable brain aneurysm.

A mother played by Flash Dance herself, Jennifer Beals, suffers a mental breakdown and while she recuperates in hospital, her husband starts a tawdry affair with a 19 year old town bike who works at a local record store. Clearly this guy is tired of his wife so he and this tramp concoct this ridiculous story that she is his long lost daughter who unexpectedly turns up at the house just after the wife is discharged from care and is trying to pick up the pieces of her life. Of course there's the usual pretence of this girl could be but she may not be so let's get a DNA test and make it all look legit. Meanwhile as they await the results of this test, the husband gets a bit too touchy-feely for the wife's liking, especially seeing as this girl is supposed to be his daughter, but he's easily able to dismiss her fears as nothing more than a remnant of her recent mental instability under the guise of either, 'why would he do this to a 19 year old' or 'why would he get inappropriate with what could potentially be his daughter'. Naturally the wife reluctantly buys it and this jerk gets a reprieve.

Not long after the wife wakes up in the night to find the daughter skulking around the house. She notices that her computer is on and finds that some important work file has been tampered with. She doesn't learn her lesson for some reason and her computer is accessed a 2nd time and an entire presentation has been erased. This upsets the overseas client who no doubt takes his business elsewhere, the wife is fired as she's considered to be taking on too much too soon and I can't help but think why anybody wouldn't automatically have some back-up on a flash drive secured at her office, but it's a Lifestyle program so that alone adds to this improbable "nightmare".

The wife confronts the daughter twice about the computer tampering, the daughter queues the water works both times, the father naturally backs her up, seeing as he's sleeping with her and the wife is thinking that's she's descending into madness again. To make matters worse, the fake DNA results are in so fake daughter is further ensconced into her adoptive family and their journey towards the dark side is almost complete.

However the whole plan unravels when the son comes home and walks in on father and fake daughter screwing; mother comes home soon after where son spills the beans, father tries his useless best to blame everybody else for his infidelity and failed music career so fake daughter starts whimpering and admits to the shady doings that even blind Freddy can now clearly see. Wife kicks husband and his whore out of the house, son reunites with his mother and they all live happily ever after.

In my opinion the whole story is one huge plot hole from start to finish. How they thought this scam was ever going to work is a mystery. What was the father going to do with his son? If his goal was to get rid of the wife and replace her with a younger sluttier model, then how was he going to explain sleeping with her when he's already introduced her to everybody they knew as his daughter? Were they planning on keeping the relationship a secret for the rest of their lives? That's the only way this could ever work as well as relying on his son or anyone with a brain not using deductive reasoning, eventually figuring it out and going to the authorities. The long lost daughter story is just dumb. It'd work a lot better if this girl were ANYTHING else other than a blood relative.

So as I've said earlier, this is the whole story and if you still decide to watch after you've been carefully forewarned then you deserve the vegetative state you'll end up in.

I don't even know where to begin.

I guess I'll start with saying the only thing that's been on my mind ever since the credits rolled ending this nightmare, which is what the hell is up Gabe? He's one of the most quietly insane characters I've seen on screen.

So his wife has a mental breakdown, and while she's in the hospital getting help he has an affair with Caitlin. This is clearly wrong and makes him a flawed man, but no one's perfect. From here his options would seem to be: a) come clean and try to repair the damage he's done to his and Liz's marriage; b) stop the affair and never tell the truth; or c) keep rendezvousing with the side hoe after Liz comes home and hide it. Instead, Gabe makes a fourth option, and this is where the lunacy really shows.

First, he has his mistress confront him and Liz outside their home claiming to be his long-lost daughter from an earlier fling. Then, he has her move in. Then, he sabotages Liz's career, which is also the only source of income for the family, while also gaslighting her by making her think he and Caitlin are up to no good and discrediting her accusations by saying he "feels it in his gut" that she's his daughter. He also invokes Liz's prior breakdown and consistently makes her feel selfish and awful for something that any normal human being would naturally feel empathy for. Next, he cooks up a very shoddy batch of blood tests, which Liz uncovers with as little effort as walking in on your kid in the kitchen with his hand in the cookie jar and crumbs on his face.

And... for what? What was all of this for? What was Gabe's end game? Was he going to divorce Liz and replace her with Caitlin, living off her minimum wage job at a record shop? What on earth was the plan?

As for the rest of the movie, it felt out-of-date and cheesy pretty frequently and the writing was mediocre. But I'll give it to Jennifer Beals, she's a good actor.

3/10

Had his plan worked , how does he explain shacking up with the daughter? Preposterous.

It was a Thursday I think and there was nothing on. So, I go to Prime to find something to watch that would hold my attention. I saw Jennifer Beals (or Bette Porter - where my L Word fans at?!) and I thought "Ohhh, this might be good." I mean, I love Jennifer Beals and the description seemed to pull me in. So I pushed play.

And this is when it started.

It...was...bad. Like 'what did I get myself into' bad. But I had to watch it until the end because I had already wasted an hour of my life and if I would have stopped I would have laid awake wondering who the daughter really was. So I kept watching and again, it...was...bad.

How bad you ask?

Acting: cringeworthy and embarrassing. The son? Sheesh. It was like watching a bad afterschool movie about the dangers of being mean to your mom.

Script: it would have been better as a comedy, because the dialogue was hilarious. The situations were ridiculous and the character chemistry was non-existent.

Plot: what the...? Ok, so the daughter is really not the daughter but she pretends to be because she is having an affair with the creepy, insensitive, lazy husband who has no job and can't even finish his album? Said creepy husband has an affair with this young, idiotic 19 year old while his oblivious wife is hospitalized for a mental breakdown and he thinks the best thing to do is to move his mistress into the house and pretend he's her dad?

Wait, what?

How did this dirtbag think he would have been able to keep up this charade? Like people know you Genius - are supposed to see you with your 'daughter' one week and then see you wifing her up the next? What about your son? How were you going to tell him? And how were you going to leave your wife? I mean, she's literally taking care of you, so you and the 19 year old would have been living in her car, eventually.

The wife catches on but he convinced her she's crazy, which is probably the only thing this movie got right because I felt crazy watching this pile of cow dung.

I was very disappointed with this movie. It had the potential to be really good. Especially when we couldn't tell WHAT was going on. But of course it turned out to be clichéd by the end. Of course.

I am so tired of Lifetime movies where the men turn out to be the losers in the situation. It would have been so much better if Liz had been insane and Caitlin had actually been his daughter. Liz flushed her pills in the first thirty minutes of the movie.

The acting was strong from everybody though, so there are points for that.

But the plot was terrible and I highly doubt that it was based on actual events.

Jennifer plays angry really well. Let this be a lesson ladies. Do not work yourself to the bone and go into debt for a man. He won't appreciate it and will trade you in for a younger model. What the end game was for his airhead minimum wage side piece is beyond me. Was this a community propertystate? Oh and the neighbors couldn't stand his lazy, pimping, gaslighting triggering self. The ending was delicious!

"A Wife's Nightmare" is without doubt one of the finest of the Lifetime film offerings. The best word to describe it is: explosive!

The filmmakers have built suspense around the issues of one of the strangest families imaginable. The film opens as we witness the wife Liz's attempt to return to her routine after a mental breakdown. Overworked and overstressed, Liz had a meltdown at work that required hospitalization and a recovery period. Now, she is planning to return to work at the untimely moment when a nineteen-year-old girl arrives on her doorstep claiming to be the daughter of Liz's husband Gabe.

The young woman named Caitlin has a DNA test that confirms she is Gabe's daughter. But the domestic scenes that follow are deeply troubling to Liz when she witnesses her husband touching Caitlin inappropriately. He subsequently goes ballistic when he spies a young man at his birthday party touching Caitlin.

The couple's teenage son AJ, who has already received a suspension for fighting, also develops a strange association with Caitlin. When she helps to boost AJ's sagging confidence with girls by placing him in contact with Jackie, a high school student whom he likes, AJ starts to give Caitlin a hug in appreciation. But the awkward moment results in a kiss on the lips. AJ feels ashamed that he has just kissed his sister! But in a slow-motion playback of the scene, it is clear that Caitlin moves in on AJ for the kiss, not vice versa.

The best scene in the film--and indeed an unforgettably choreographed fight scene--is the argument that escalates into physical violence between husband and wife. The precious acoustic guitar that Liz bought for Gabe is a significant prop in the fight. The scene moves from inside the home to the driveway where a crowd of neighbors witnesses the altercation. While the motivation of the scene was unusual, the actual fight was a truly scary and credible incident of domestic violence.

The performances were uniformly excellent, and the pacing of the film kept the audience on edge from scene to scene. Watch this film, and you will never forget the final 10 minutes.