KILL FOR ME

US, 2013, 95 minutes, Colour.
Katie Cassidy, Tracy Spiradakos, Donal Logue, Adam Di Marco, Torrance Coombs, Leah Gibson.
Directed by Michael Greenspan.

Kill for Me is something of a melodramatic potboiler with an attempt to explore psychological relationships.

A young woman, Natalie, goes missing and her roommates, with whom she was close, need to find a replacement for her for financial purposes. There is an application and interview by a young woman, Hayley (Tracy Spiradakos), from the country, doing studies, and acceptable to the two young women.

The central character, Amanda (Katie Cassidy, daughter of pop star David Cassidy) is somewhat introverted, a jogger, menaced by a former boyfriend who is sinister and violent. She is saved during an attack by Hayley who kills the aggressor.

Amanda is upset by the experience and still is anxious about Natalie but is comforted by Hayley, making sexual advances to her to which Amanda responds. This mutual dependence leads to a plot development which may remind cinemagoers of the pact between the two friends in Alfred Hitchcock’s version of Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train. Hayley has killed for Amanda. She now proposes that Amanda kill her abusive father who is the cause of her mother’s death. Hayley visits her father with whom she clashes – and Amanda sees Hayley’s back in the shower with all kinds of welts and wounds.

Hayley holds matters over Amanda, especially with the burying of the aggressor’s body on her father’s property. It the becomes somewhat far-fetched as Amanda prepares herself as something of a vamp and tries seductive chat with Hayley’s father at a bar. He confides in her and, just as Amanda is about to poison the father, he explains about Hayley and her self-destructive attitudes, cutting herself and having clashed with her mother.

Amanda then pretends that she has killed the father and takes Hayley to him but he is feigning and there is a violent encounter between the three, the father suddenly turning violent and, to everyone’s surprise, we find that he has abducted their friend, Natalie, and has been keeping her prisoner in his barn.

This more than surprise ending rather undercuts the plot developments up till then as well as the psychological developments, especially with a more sympathetic view of the father and discovering the truth about Hayley – which rather spoils the merits of what has gone before.

The film was co-written by director, Michael Greenspan, and Christopher Dodd. They had collaborated previously on the melodramatic drama with Adrien Brody, Wrecked.