There’s been a Death At The Dinner Party!

This Lifetime film has a title that makes it sound like it should be one of those British murder mysteries, set in the 1920s and featuring a Scotland Yard inspector limping around a mansion while trying to figure out who killed the notorious ne’er-do-well, Freddy Gibbs.  (The Inspector would limp because of the wound he received while fighting in the Great War.)  Was it the maid?  Was it the groundskeeper?  Was it the flighty flapper or the grand dame with the mysterious past?  Or was the murderer the shadowy visitor from America, the one who is rumored to be connected to bootleggers in Toronto.  Fear not!  Stanley of the Yard is on the case!

Where was I?  Oh yeah, I was creating a different movie in my head.  Anyway, let’s talk about the movie that I actually watched….

Andrea Gibbs (Candice Lidstone) is visiting her son, Ethan (Cameron Brodeur).  Ethan is a somewhat nerdy college student who is rooming with a platonic female friend who he is obviously in love with.  Andrea can tell that Ethan has been friend zoned and sweetly asks his roommate to let him down gently.  Ethan’s roommate later ends up dead at a dinner party that is attended by Ethan and Andrea.  The dinner party’s host is a psychology professor, Alan Jackson (Mark Day).  Jackson posts his fascistic lectures online and he has a loyal following of all-male students.  Gee, can you guess who was actually behind the murder?

(Last summer, Erin and I watched several episodes of an old show that featured Jim Hutton as Ellery Queen.  We loved it whenever Hutton would suddenly look at the camera and say, “Well, I’ve figured this one out!  Have you!?”  I have to admit that usually, I had not.  Erin was much better at figuring out who the murderer was than I was.  But, in the case of this film, I think Ellery probably would have looked straight at the camera before the murder even happened.)

There’s nothing particularly subtle about Death At The Dinner Party.  The film’s portrayal of dangerous, right-wing college professors gives the whole thing a dated feel, as if it should have aired ten years earlier than it did.  The film could have just as easily have been called Murder On The Intellectual Dark Web or Death At Evergreen College.  Today, I imagine that members of the angry dishrag brigade are a more realistic danger than a fight club of psych majors.  But the lack of subtlety and even the dated premise give this film a certain charm.  It’s over-the-top and it embraces the melodrama, just as every Lifetime film should.

Though she only appears to be a few years older than the actor playing her son, Candice Lidstone does a good job playing the mother who is rightly concerned about what her child is learning in college.  Indeed, the mother-child relationship was this film’s secret weapon. When I was in college, I never would have had the courage to invite my mom to a dinner party with any of my professors.  Then again, at my college, dinner with a professor usually meant a lot more alcohol and definitely a lot more weed.  However, there was also significantly less murder so everything evened out in the end.