Death Saved My Life (2021)

(On Cable TV, September 2022) I often joke that one of the reasons why Lifetime/Hallmark/BET movies are so popular with their intended audiences is that they keep recycling the same plot for added comfort even in delivering “thrills.”  But I didn’t expect the Lifetime original movie Death Saved My Life to track so closely another film. Let’s see—woman realizing that she’s in an abusive relationship gets out of it by faking her death, but is later found out by the abuser, leading to a final violent confrontation. So far so good? Well, that also happens to be the plot summary of 2017’s BET original movie Til Death Do Us Part, and it’s not even race-flipped for plausible deniability. Alas, it also manages to be worse and even more morally conflicted. Til Death Do Us Part, for all of its blunt caricature of an abusive marriage and cliché plotting, was at least clear on the moral righteousness of its protagonist: she was an angelic victim, and the husband (after a perfect honeymoon period) was a cartoonishly evil person. Our protagonist was also relatively clever in the confines of the genre, having a near-perfect plan unravelled by an innocent dangling thread. When the film moved on to the final confrontation, there wasn’t much ambiguity: she was good, he was bad, he wanted to kill her, so she defended herself. Not great art, but at least we knew where we stood. Death Saved My Life can’t even manage that. Our heroine is not only dumb as dirt, but her post-disappearance plan becomes an implausibly elaborate campaign of psychological torture, even endangering innocents in targeting her no-good surgeon husband. In going too far in revenge, Death Saved My Life becomes a confused piece of work, with the tormented becoming such a tormenter than the entire thing becomes far less enjoyable. It also feeds into a vexing finale that has the merit of not reaching for pure violence, but still leaves unsatisfied. It would have been a fascinating reversal of expectations in a more sober-minded drama examining the consequences of righteous revenge, but let’s face it: Death Saved My Life is utterly uninterested in nuance—good woman beats bad man is about as sophisticated as it wants to be. As much as it pains me to do so, I’m going to recommend watching a low-budget BET original instead: At least Til Death Do Us Part has the advantage of knowing exactly what it’s doing. Too bad for Meagan Good—she (alongside her real-life sister playing he fictional sister) deserved better than this.