Yes, the movie has multiple titles.
In 2021’s A Deadly Grudge, Lindsey (Annika Foster) owns a restaurant with her fiancé Gavin (Jonathan Stoddard). (It’s a Lifetime film and, in the world of Lifetime, there’s nothing easier than owning your own restaurant or opening your own art gallery.) Her father, Jim (Patrick M.J. Finerty), is internet-famous for his cooking videos. And her mother… well, she’s dead. She dies while she’s out jogging and a car runs her over. What’s odd is that she doesn’t bother to get out of the way of the car despite having several minutes in which to do so. It’s always strange to me how people in Lifetime films always seem to end up jogging in the middle of the road. I start nearly every morning with a jog and I usually manage to stay on the sidewalk. It’s just safer that way.
At her mother’s funeral, Lindsey is shocked to see Jim hugging a younger woman. Lindsey immediately assumes that Jim is having an affair, because why else would you hug someone at a funeral? Jim explains that the younger woman is actually Sarah (Aubrey Reynolds). Sarah is not his mistress. Sarah is his daughter. It turns out that Lindsey never learned that she had a half-sister. Lindsey also didn’t know that her parents never actually got married. Instead, Jim was legally married to Sarah’s mother because Sarah’s family would have disowned her if she had a child out of wedlock. To be honest, not a single part of Jim’s story makes any sense, but somehow Lindsey accepts it.
To continue being honest, it’s pretty obvious that Sarah was the one who ran over Lindsey’s mother. If you’ve ever seen a Lifetime film, you know that Sarah’s guilty, because long-lost siblings are always guilty. In typical Lifetime fashion, Lindsey is immediately suspicious of Sarah, but everyone else loves her. Jim is especially happy when he discovers that Sarah knows how to bake. Whoops — Sarah put some cinnamon in one of her recipes! Lindsey is deathly allergic to cinnamon! It never ceases to amaze me how every Lifetime film seems to feature at least one person with a deadly food allergy. I always get the feeling that Lifetime studios must be full of discarded EpiPens.
The title refers to Sarah, who definitely does have a grudge against Lindsey. However, it could also refer to Lindsey, who takes an immediate dislike to her half-sister and who spends the entire movie getting mad about the fact that not everyone else seems to hate her as much as she does. More like Two Sisters’ Grudges, to be honest. (The film was also released as A Sister’s Grudge, which is closer, but still only counts one of them.) It actually gets kind of amusing after a little while. Every time someone says anything nice about Sarah, Lindsey scowls and dramatically rolls her eyes. Occasionally, she gasps in disbelief. She’s so vocal about her dislike of Sarah that you actually end up feeling a little bit sorry for Sarah. I mean, Sarah is the one who grew up with an unstable mom and the knowledge that her father had another family that he loved more than her.
Anyway, this is pretty much a standard Lifetime melodrama. Unfortunately, no one in the film is particularly sympathetic. Lindsey comes across like someone who would talk about you behind your back. Sarah comes across like she would try to poison you with cinnamon. I’ll let you decide which is worse.
