When the Bough Breaks (2016)

(In French, On TV, September 2022) Frankly, I’ve seen enough BET original movies that the only surprising thing about When the Bough Breaks is that I didn’t see it on BET. Otherwise, it scrupulously follows one of their formulas—or is it one of the Lifetime channel formulas? Suffice to say that the story starts when a married couple hires a surrogate to have a baby and, well, you can probably see where this is going: the surrogate falls in love with the male lead, reveals her psychotic nature and it’s up to our married leads to deal with the situation. (Although you really won’t be surprised to learn that it’s the woman who definitely deals with it.)  Plot-wise, this is really a mild made-for-TV potboiler (not too disturbing, though, considering the target audience) that benefits from better actors and more budget for production values. It doesn’t exactly work: as much as I like Regina Hall and Morris Chestnut, and even if Jaz Sinclair is a beauty, the film plods along intensely predictable lines, with the antagonist being nothing more than a bunch of screenwriting clichés without an inner life. But it also approaches distaste in revolving around surrogate pregnancy—When the Bough Breaks is simply not good enough, smart enough or worthy enough to play around with complex issues such as that one, and feels increasingly cheap as it raises the stakes through threatened abortion or infanticide. (And that’s before we get into unpleasant implications of seeing a wealthy lead couple fighting against a markedly less fortunate surrogate.)  In doing so, it also becomes decidedly un-fun, which is not insignificant in terms of made-for-TV movies: Part of why they work on preposterous premises, low budgets and dubious production values is that they’re essentially meaningless—you can simply enjoy them without really worrying about the characters. The more When the Bough Breaks tries for real suspense (not that it actually succeeds), the less fun it becomes, at which point we’re left to ask—why bother? Maybe BET understood that in not broadcasting this one.