Dear Best Friend (2021)

(On Cable TV, October 2022) Aw, yes, BET, you know what I like in a thriller: Something completely ludicrous, so over-the-top that it doesn’t feel threatening in any way. All the ingredients that writer-director DeShon Hardy’s Dear Best Friend has to spare. The broken-up chronology of the film makes it feel more complicated than it is, but the gist of the film’s plot is this: A woman still plagued by the sudden death of a friend two years earlier starts reading a novel that seems to eerily describe what happened to her friend… and predict the danger now facing her. The explanation for that plot element is so far-fetched as to defy a sane description (although, thankfully, it’s not supernatural), but not so far-fetched as the main character seemingly taking days to read the entire book. (Much of Dear Best Friend becomes far more understandable once you presume it features morons as characters.)  Still, considering that kind of film, exactly no one will be surprised to learn that the danger is coming from inside the house—murderous husbands have been a favourite tool of BET thrillers for a long time and this one is no exception. (Part of the jumbled chronology also serves to delay the moment of realization that, wait, she did marry her dead best friend’s husband, at which point the rest of the film becomes even more than incredibly obvious.)  So, yeah, Dear Best Friend is trashy—but the trashiness is part of the appeal, at least if you’re used to that specific kind of made-for-TV thriller.