by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime movie was billed as a “premiere,”
though according to imdb.com the film was actually made in 2016, and there’s
some confusion about the title: Lifetime’s Web site and the Los Angeles
Times TV listings called it Trapped
Sisters, imdb.com called it 12
Feet Under, and the actual credits listed
both names: Trapped Sisters 12 Feet Under. The film apparently reflected director and co-writer (with Michael
Hultquist) Matt Eskandari’s lifelong fear of large bodies of water, swimming
pools in particular. “Pools and oceans all trigger a bona fide sense of dread
for me. Just the whole idea of being trapped in a pool makes me sweat,”
Eskandari told an interviewer. “I decided to tap into that fear and the concept
blossomed from there.” He got his inspiration from a news story from December
2015 about how a young woman had drowned in an indoor swimming pool when its
management, not knowing she was in there, closed the fiberglass lid to the pool
and left her trapped inside. What Eskandari and Hultquist came up with was a
grim story in which two young women, sisters Bree (Nora Jane Noone) and Jonna
(Alexandra Park) — the name is pronounced “Jonah” and Eskandari and Hultquist
acknowledged she was named after the Biblical Jonah — are being pestered by McGradey
(Tobin Bell) to get out of the public pool already so he can close its
fiberglass cover, lock up the building and go home for the three-day holiday
weekend, during which the pool will be closed. (Why? One would think the pool
should be kept open during the
holiday weekend because that’s when there would be peak demand for it!)
The
other swimmers (all nubile young women, it seems) get out on time but one of
them realizes she’s lost her engagement ring, which has wedged itself in the
drainage grate at the pool’s bottom. She dives for it, the other sister dives
in as well to help her, and just then McGradey punches the buttons that seal
the pool shut for the weekend and goes home. The women realize they’re trapped
in the pool, and to screw up the melodramatics even further Bree realizes that
she’s left her insulin pen in her purse. She’s diabetic — though Jonna hasn’t
known that about her sister until now — and without the shot she’s liable to go
into a coma, which under their current circumstances means she’ll drown. As if that weren’t enough of a plot for you, Eskandari and
Hultquist introduce a villainess, Rita (Diane Farr) — the imdb.com page on the
film lists her name as “Carla” but “Rita” is the name I heard on the soundtrack
— who’s the woman hired to clean the outside of the pool and who took the job
because it was the only one she could get after being released from prison nine
months earlier. Rita hears Bree and Jonna cry for help, but instead of
unsealing the pool she decides to torment the two rich bitches who until now
have seemingly had everything their own way. (They haven’t: in the sort of
settling-accounts conversations people, at least in movies, have when they’re
facing imminent doom, they’ve talked about how their father molested both of them
and died in a house fire, though by the end Bree has confessed that she killed
him, knocking him out with the usual blunt instrument and leaving his body to
be burned up instead of attempting to rescue him.) Rita, who comes off like a
graduate of the Aileen Wournos School of Charm, torments the two women,
demanding the password to Bree’s cell phone (her fiancé David has been calling
her regularly and is starting to get concerned about her) and the PIN code for
her bank account. She extracts both those pieces of information but gets even
more upset when the account turns out to have only $80 in it. Then she demands
the engagement ring, and a desperate Bree gives it to her. “A pawn shop will
give me something for this,” Rita says heartlessly. (It occurred to me that if
the stone in the ring was a diamond, the two women could have used it to cut
through the fiberglass cover and escape.)
Rita tortures the women by shutting
off the lights and heat in the pool, thereby ensuring that the water will get
colder and give them hypothermia in addition to all their other problems, and
at one point, when one of the women stabs Rita through the hole in the covering
they’ve been able to cut with a shard of fiberglass they found under the water,
Rita responds by turning on the valves to add more water to the pool and
threatening to dispatch them that much sooner. Then she relents, but she’s made
the point that the two women are totally at her mercy down there. Once she decides she’s tormented them enough,
she tries to open the pool — only the code won’t work: McGradey must have
changed it without telling her what the new code was. Ultimately the women get
out when one of them pulls up the grate at the pool’s bottom and they use the
heavy metal grate to poke a large enough hole in the cover that they can get
out — and Rita develops enough of a conscience that, after threatening to shoot
the two women then and there (with a hot-looking gold-colored gun — where did
she get it?), she relents and even gives them back the engagement ring (ya
remember the engagement ring?). Trapped
Sisters a.k.a. 12 Feet Under seems like a movie perfectly suited to the Trump-era
Zeitgeist: the heroines are rich
and the villains are proletarians (though Rita drops hints that she, too, once
had money and a privileged lifestyle until she fell — one presumes from
alcohol, drugs or maybe a more exotic form of addiction), and it’s actually
well made, several cuts above Lifetime’s usual fare (it was produced by one of
Lifetime’s usual partners, MarVista Entertainment — an ironic name given the
subject matter and the director’s phobia — in association with a company called
“Citizen Skull,” whose logo is a skeleton reading a newspaper) and suffering
more than usual from the inevitable commercial interruptions. But it’s also
beset by typical Lifetime melodramatics and sillinesses, though at least Nora
Jane Noone and Alexandra Paul are capable as the damsels in distress (and they
look enough alike to be credible as sisters on screen), while — in a genre in
which the villains are almost always more interesting than the heroes — Diane
Farr as the hard-bitten Rita easily takes the acting honors.
