Il lato oscuro di mia madre

When 21-year-old Ashley Beck-Ford finds her biological mother, Sara Hillman, online, she is shocked and thrilled... But building a relationship with her long-lost mother proves to be more dangerous than Ashley could have ever imagined. Soon after meeting her, Sara's husband is murdered. Ashley soon finds herself caught in a web of lies and deceit in which she isn't sure if her mother is innocent or guilty of that murder.

Laurie Fortier does well as the mother with a past - she has a secret, takes pills and has a lost daughter. The plot is intricate, has some good twists, though the outcome is predictable. The lead actresses make fine detectives, but the doubt of whether the mother is innocent is well done, and it's only at the last moment the truth comes out.

Quite a complicated story. A young woman locates her birth mother. The birth mother is married to a wealthy man with a daughter from a previous marriage. She is happy to see her but has some issues and a checkered past. Then the birth mother's husband is murdered. Is she a murderer? The daughters set out to find out what's going on. It's quite intriguing. Confusingly the actresses are all brunette and don't look different enough from each other. Plausible enough.

The law has changed and 21 year old adopted Ashley Beck Ford is finally able to access her own birth certificate. Her birth mother is Sara Hillman. It's a happy reunion until Sara's stepdaughter Kelsie shows up. Sara tells her husband that night who is getting tired of her checkered past. He's not clean either with some dirty dealing with his brother and then he's murdered in his own bed. Sara becomes the prime suspect.

This is a TV movie made like a TV movie. It's Lifetime. That's my main complaint. From the actors to the directing to the editing, everything is at a TV movie level. It's all a little stiff and over-melodramatic at the same time. Nevertheless, it could have been a fun little murder mystery. It does need more mystery with a few more red herrings and a big twist. That is the straw that breaks the camel's back. The mystery is not much of a mystery. This is Lifetime at its lower average.

A reviewer mentioned that when the college-aged daughter read her birth date, it read "1978". However, this is a mistake. Earlier when the daughter was filing her application, she wrote her date of birth as "1999". The "1978" refers to the birth mother's birthday. This is confirmed when the daughter searches online for her birth mother and she types in the birth mother's name along with the 1978 birth date.

In the past, many of the Lifetime movies were so superficial and cheaply made, but this one has a decent plot for once. The characters are still not well defined or interact well, but I blame it well on the penny pinching ways of the producers and the director. If they could have put more money into the quality of the script, I believe Conradt could have written a better movie. Since we know cheapness would have been a standard practice of Lifetime, I think it is very possible she could have written a more believable script. The seven stars that was given to this movie, was mostly given because of the script, except for that one minor flaw that could have been caught by proper proof reading.