Deadly Illusions

Deadly Illusions is an objectively bad movie. It treads familiar thriller territory without offering anything new or even executing its tired tropes particularly well. Also, the two lead female characters, the ones who get all smoochie with each other happen to have the same names as me and my sister. So that’s another point against the movie for me specifically.

Deadly Illusions focuses on rich mystery author, Mary Morrison. Mary has put her career on hold in place of focusing on family. But as she’s tempted into writing a new book, she decides to hire a caregiver for her children. Enter Grace. Grace is young, pretty and endlessly helpful and complimentary to Mary. Mary soon develops an attraction to Grace and begins taking their relationship past normal parameters of employer and caregiver. However, as their relationship develops a physical element, Mary begins having trouble separating fact from dreams. Is Mary a murderer or is someone gaslighting her?

The not so surprising plot twist is that Grace is the bad guy all along. But honestly, thank god because otherwise, Mary’s relationship with her is inappropriate as hell. Grace initially presents as that sort of slutty, virgin schoolgirl. She’s innocent, naive and wears incredibly short white skirts. Mary’s into this. One of the first times she goes beyond appropriate is when she takes Grace to go bra shopping and watches as she tries bras on. Following this, she enjoys staring at the much younger Grace from a distance while smoking a cigar and imagining Grace in clothes Mary picked out for her. It’s symbolic, get it! Having Grace turn out to be someone ready and willing to stab people effectively cuts through what would otherwise be a rather concerning power dynamic.

Although, maybe none of that is relevant anyway because none of the characters here act like real people. We’re definitely verging on a vibe of aliens guessing how human interactions happen. There’s a lack of depth in any character and especially their dialogue. Characters are unbelievably blunt here. They say exactly what they’re thinking because the script doesn’t know how else to move the plot forward if not for characters announcing what will happen next. Following the absurd bra shopping scene, I thought maybe this was a case of a male creator not understanding women. But the writer/director is a woman so I guess it’s a more general problem. She doesn’t understand people in general or at least, how to write good characters.

Deadly Illusions simultaneously manages to have no subtly and also fails to set up its third act plot twist. The lack of subtly comes from the aforementioned shallow dialogue and how stock all of these characters are. Of course Grace is the villain! She’s coded so heavily as an innocent, virginal girl that this is the only route her character could take! Also, there are no problems in Mary’s life before she shows up. However, the plot twist that it’s not technically Grace but a second personality comes out of nowhere. There’s no set up here, no scenes of Grace acting out of character or a scene where Mary sees her arguing with herself or anything. Just one scene where she sees a more sexually dominant Grace seduce her husband.

So yeah, Grace has the bad, inaccurate, thriller version of dissociative identity disorder. We’re definitely entering a time in which finally, treatment of mental illness in the thriller genre is being talked about. But that discussion doesn’t reach Deadly Illusions. One mild compliment I will give the film is what happens afterwards. Mary maintains a relationship with Grace and comforts her following Grace’s stint of violence. At the end, we see Mary visiting a now childlike Grace in the hospital. So that’s nice, I guess. Yeah, mentally ill people are still murderers but Deadly Illusions and its lead character at least offers them some sympathy, I guess.

One of the biggest problems with Deadly Illusions is its nearly two hour runtime. That’s way too fucking long. It takes an hour for Mary to become mentally uncertain and 80 minutes for anyone to be murdered. The first two acts of this movie which is basically Mary and her husband objectifying the hot babysitter drag on endlessly. Deadly Illusions is basically a Lifetime thriller movie. Except Lifetime thrillers have to clock in at around 90 minutes. Deadly Illusions really could have benefited from this restraint. There’s absolutely 30 minutes you could cut from the film and it would be a better movie for it.

Deadly Illusions is honestly, pretty fun. It’s a terribly written story but has some budget and decent cinematography. That’s the best kind of bad movie; one that’s very dumb but looks decent. It’s still too long, bad about mental illness and lacks any subtly. But in a fun and good looking way! It’s bad in a way that does get a laugh or two. Deadly Illusions joins the exclusive pantheon of bad WLW movies that are actually fun to watch.

Overall rating: 3.7/10

Other WLW films in similar genres