Off the Rails (2017)
6/10
Convoluted and hard to follow, but ending is so delicious it's almost worth it
26 April 2021
Warning: Spoilers
This is one of those movies where you absolutely must pay attention every minute, to every scene, or you'll be hopelessly lost. And even though you do that, you still might have to watch it over again like I did, to pick up a few loose ends. And even if you do those two things, you might still be confused because it's so full of plot holes.

So a brief summary of this movie, as I understood it:

Nicole and Mark Barrow are dating/engaged, and decide to "take a break" for a while, either right before or shortly after she meets Luc Cormier, the "hot guy" she meets on campus. He was there visiting his then-girlfriend Jillian Borsic who worked in the IT dept. Of the college that Nicole also worked at as an adjunct (part-time) professor of geography/cartology.

Luc and Nicole start an affair and fall in love, and then Nicole is in the train wreck, where she loses her memory. She regains most of her memory in the following months, regarding her job and her boyfriend Mark, etc. - everything except Luc and their affair. During her recuperation from the accident, she and Mark get married, because "he was so sweet to her, treating her like porcelain". Several times she is scared to death by random incidents of strange men making advances to her in various places, as if she had set up the dates with them in advance.

She has never created any online social media accounts like almost everyone else in the world, but her co-worker Zara, who filled in for her during her recuperation from the train accident, insists that she has accounts along with friends and followers on the three major media giants: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. To prove it to her, while Nicole is watching, Zara pulls up Nicole's unbeknownst-to-her social media accounts, and something else that surprises them both: photos of Nicole and Luc as a romantic couple all over her Instagram. This was the first inkling Nicole had of Luc since the train wreck took her memories of him away.

So Nicole goes in search of Luc and finds out his last name and occupation, and the memories of their time together slowly come back to her, but: *SPOILERS AHEAD*

Her memories have been manipulated since the accident during hypnotizing sessions with her psychiatrist Dr. Teres, to make her subconsciously believe that she killed Luc, because Teres and Mark Barrow, Nicole's husband, are old friends, having met back when they both attended Harvard. Mark went to Luc's house to confront him about his and Nicole's affair on the same night as the train wreck. They got into a fight and Mark strangled him. Thinking he had killed him, he brought his body back to his and Nicole's house and began to bury him in a huge container in the ground, with Teres helping him. But after only a few shovelfuls of dirt on top of the container, in which Luc was slowly regaining consciousness, the doorbell rang. Both Mark and Teres went inside the house to see who was at the door, at which time Luc took the opportunity to get out of the container and escape, unbeknownst to the two villains who went back outside to finish the job of burying what was now an empty container.

Luc sent a few messages to Nicole during this time under the fake name of Martin Double-U: a photo of two park benches along with longitude and latitude coordinates of the location, which Nicole made note of, even though she didn't know who Martin really was (until later when she figured it all out and met him there at the very end).

Jillian Borsic - Luc's former flame - had created the social media accounts with Nicole's name and set up the dates with the several sex perverts who had previously accosted her, to get revenge on her for taking Luc away from her. She sent Nicole a train ticket via a messenger service and surprised her on the train, and admitted to Nicole that she had set up the accounts and the dates. She also thought Nicole knew where Luc was since he hadn't been seen since the night of her train accident, but Nicole truthfully told her she didn't know where he was.

*SPOILERS AHEAD* Jillian killing herself in front of Nicole on the train platform was apparently for no other reason than needless contrived dramatic effect.

The climax was also needlessly violent and bloody (which is unusual for Lifetime movies - as is cussing, which occurred a few times in this, so this must have been a non-LMN movie to begin with): Mark lies to Nicole in telling her that she had killed Luc, which triggered a hypnotization-induced 'memory' that she had stabbed Luc in the stomach when he was trying to dump her, but it wasn't true (so confusing!) - it was part of his and Teres' ongoing attempt to program her into believing that she had killed Luc, to keep the suspicion off Mark; ironically because neither of them knew yet that Luc had actually escaped and wasn't dead. Mark calls Dr. Teres to come over right away to help convince (hypnotize) Nicole that she had killed Luc, which is when Nicole learns of their secret criminal partnership.

In the ensuing uproar, Mark punches Nicole out - hitting her in the face and in the stomach, and when she tries to fight back and insists that she had not killed Luc and accuses Mark of doing it because she had seen the video of his car at Luc's house (that Jillian had sent the detective before she met Nicole on the train) the night that he had gone missing.

Sweet ending: Of course Nicole (barely) survives the climactic chaos; the two villains are killed; and finally we get a sweetly delicious payoff for having struggled through the convoluted plot when Nicole takes a train to meet Martin Double-U, who is really Luc, of course, and the two lovingly kiss and hug and supposedly live happily ever after.

I hope this "brief" summary helps those who were confused by the disjointed flick.

Grade C / 6 out of 10 (only because Luc was one of the very few truly hot guys on the Lifetime channels - otherwise would be 5)
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