Unfinished Business
They only met 6 months earlier but Sarah (Haylie Duff - A Nanny's Secret) and Dr Kevin Richardson (Ty Olsson - The Killing Game) head down the aisle in a beautiful wedding service. Having relocated to a new home near to where Kevin works, Sarah takes a job as a substitute teacher at a nearby school despite Kevin being concerned due to Sarah having a heart condition. But shortly after their marriage the cracks begin to show with Kevin not only losing a patient but showing his obsessive, controlling side whilst his sister Jolene (Magda Apanowicz - The 12 Disasters of Christmas) takes it upon herself to start renovating their garden. When Sarah begins to become concerned by Kevin's change in mood she realises she hardly knows the man she married and uncovers a few surprises when she starts to dig in to his past.
I have watched a lot of made for TV movies but rarely have I watched one as inconsistent as "Til Death Do Us Part" and it left me completely bemused. In fact as I watched "Til Death Do Us Part" I got a feeling that maybe those who were financing this movie saw what had been shot and withdrew their backing as it has an unfinished, cobbled together feeling about it, with the story ending up disjointed and using title cards to try and link various parts together. In truth I actually think the only way that "Til Death Do Us Part" works is if you are a devotee of this sort of Lifetime movie and you can read between the lines.
So I will break "Til Death Do Us Part" down to the key points. We have Sarah who pops pills which her husband gives her for a heart condition. She barely knows anything about her husband who she married after just 6 months of knowing. A neighbour's dog goes missing, a work colleague of Sarah's gets sacked after a run in with the police and then dies, the husband becomes controlling and obsessive, his sister is always around, Sarah's old friend is concerned. I could go on because there are a lot of familiar bits and pieces in "Til Death Do Us Part" but they are so messily tossed together that unless you have come across this sort of movie before you might not be able to read between the lines as to what is going on.
But I have to return to that feeling of "Til Death Do Us Part" being unfinished and that shows up in the performances because the conversations between the characters come across as unnatural. Often the editing makes these conversation scenes fail to flow and to be honest we never get any real character depth which makes it extremely hard to get in to it in the first place.
What this all boils down to is that "Til Death Do Us Part" ends up poor and really comes across as if this movie was cobbled together having had a troubled production as it just doesn't feel like it is finished.
