"Secrets of My Stepdaughter" was originally shot under the title "A Murderer Upstairs," which sounds more chilling but was probably rejected because it gave too much of the plot away. The central characters are mom Cindy Kent (Josie Davis), her husband Greg (Cameron Bancroft) — a trial attorney whose job takes him out of town a lot — and their kids Rachel (Tierra Skovbye) and Addy (Ali Skovbye). The identical last names of the actresses playing the sisters at least shows why they look so credible as blood relatives — they really are! — though in Conor Allyn's screenplay (effectively and unobtrusively directed by Jem Garrard) they're only half-sisters. Addy, the younger of the two girls, is the biological offspring of Greg and Cindy, but Rachel is Greg's daughter by a previous wife named Martha whom we don't meet until towards the end of the film. Martha suddenly abandoned Rachel just three months before the film begins, and Greg and Cindy took her in and tried to break through to her. Rachel got a job at a fashion store alongside her best friend Leslie (Madelyn Grace), only in the opening scene Rachel is discovered tied to a chair in the store and Leslie is next to her, bludgeoned to death with the store's cash register.
Rachel's story is that two robbers, both wearing ski masks and gloves, burst into the store, attacked both her and Leslie, killed Leslie and left Rachel for dead — and she's got strangulation marks on her neck to support the story. The cops uncover a young (cute, blond) man named Aaron Barker (Jared Ager-Foster) who several months earlier was stalking Leslie to the point where Leslie and her mom got out a restraining order against him, and he was in the store that night, but Aaron insists that when the murder occurred he was at home with his mother. That's not much of an alibi, as police lieutenant Brian Smith (a big middle-aged white guy played by Garry Chalk) says; he becomes convinced early on that Aaron killed Leslie and utterly refuses to listen to any other possibilities. (Stop me if you've heard this before.) His associate, detective Pam Cherfils (Lucia Walters) —oddly her last name means "dear son" and, though younger than these characters usually are in Lifetime movies, she's the all-wise African-American who's going to come into the story and save the white characters from their stupidity and naïveté —isn't so sure. She begins to suspect Rachel actually murdered her friend, and as the film goes on and Rachel's behavior gets more squirrelly and bizarre, Cindy does too (as do we). Secrets of My Stepdaughter may not sound like much in synopsis, but it's actually a quite effective suspense thriller, powered by Jem Garrard's effective direction and a nicely honed performance by Tiera Skovbye as Rachel, who in the best tradition of Lifetime's psychos is quite matter-of-fact about her actions and convinces us that she simply doesn't see anything wrong with them.
Rachel's story is that two robbers, both wearing ski masks and gloves, burst into the store, attacked both her and Leslie, killed Leslie and left Rachel for dead — and she's got strangulation marks on her neck to support the story. The cops uncover a young (cute, blond) man named Aaron Barker (Jared Ager-Foster) who several months earlier was stalking Leslie to the point where Leslie and her mom got out a restraining order against him, and he was in the store that night, but Aaron insists that when the murder occurred he was at home with his mother. That's not much of an alibi, as police lieutenant Brian Smith (a big middle-aged white guy played by Garry Chalk) says; he becomes convinced early on that Aaron killed Leslie and utterly refuses to listen to any other possibilities. (Stop me if you've heard this before.) His associate, detective Pam Cherfils (Lucia Walters) —oddly her last name means "dear son" and, though younger than these characters usually are in Lifetime movies, she's the all-wise African-American who's going to come into the story and save the white characters from their stupidity and naïveté —isn't so sure. She begins to suspect Rachel actually murdered her friend, and as the film goes on and Rachel's behavior gets more squirrelly and bizarre, Cindy does too (as do we). Secrets of My Stepdaughter may not sound like much in synopsis, but it's actually a quite effective suspense thriller, powered by Jem Garrard's effective direction and a nicely honed performance by Tiera Skovbye as Rachel, who in the best tradition of Lifetime's psychos is quite matter-of-fact about her actions and convinces us that she simply doesn't see anything wrong with them.