Movie Review: 'Deadly Illusions' is a High Camp Thriller

If Cinemax made a lifetime movie, that movie would be Deadly Illusions, a trashy soap opera with just enough trash to reach an R-Rating. Deadly Illusions stars Sex and the City’s Kristin Davis as Mary Morrison, a bestselling author with a seemingly perfect life. She has wealth, a doting husband, Tom (Dermot Mulroney at his most bland), and two adorable moppets who don’t have much to do with this movie other than being plot devices.

The story of Deadly Illusions kicks in when Mary is pressured by her publisher to write a new book in her successful franchise. Mary is not interested in doing this, especially after it is suggested that she turn her heroine into a villainess. She’s forced to accept the deal for a new book however when Tom tells her an investment he and some friends had made had tanked and with it went some of the fortune they’d amassed.

With two kids at home, Mary doesn’t exactly have time and space for her usual writing routine. Thus, there is a need for a nanny. Mary is nonplussed about hiring a stranger to watch her children and the movie uses a hack comedy montage to show Mary meeting with various weirdo caricature characters to underline why she’s reluctant to hire anyone. The comedy montage is desperately out of date, tone deaf, and unfunny, a rather perfect microcosm of Deadly Illusions.

Just as Mary’s about to dismiss the whole idea of hiring a nanny, in walks Grace (Greer Grammer). Grace has the look of a stereotypical librarian, she’s demure and intelligent and when the kids arrive home early, she immediately bonds with them. Grace is hired and Mary sets off on writing her book. However, there is something strange about Grace that Mary can’t quite put her finger on.

As their relationship develops and Mary struggles with writer’s block, Mary begins to look at Grace differently. Though, as she explains to her best friend, Elaine (Shanola Hampton), that she’s never been attracted to a woman before, she finds herself fantasizing about Grace. Elaine pushes her to follow this feeling and make it part of her book. When she does this, her writer’s block breaks but so do the walls between reality and fantasy.

Deadly Illusions is a terrible movie but a fun sort of terrible. It’s a really watchable bad movie in the tradition of bad Lifetime Movies but with the kink of an R-rating. That’s also an area of weirdness as the movie earns an R-Rating but is also bizarrely chaste in the presentation of the sexual elements of the movie. There is a borderline prudishness to the lengths the movie goes to in order to keep the stars covered up while showing just enough to get an R-Rating. I’m not saying nudity would make the movie better, rather it just becomes comical how the movie tries to be sexy while staying covered up.

There is a ham-fisted quality to the way the filmmakers appear to toy with stereotypes and conventional male/female signifiers. Davis’s Mary is haphazardly assigned qualities traditionally associated with male characters. Mary smokes cigars, is sexually aggressive with her husband, she’s the breadwinner in the family and her husband is highly subservient to her. And, she also appears to want to bang the babysitter.

I like the idea of toying with traditional character traits and upending expectations of male and female characters but, Deadly Illusions is so clumsy in this aspect that the impact is lost. The movie seems to stop to show you these qualities about Mary, as if someone were pointing a sign at her and saying ‘see, usually it’s the man who does this, not a female character.’ I get it, Mary has typically male traits. Mary’s traits never feel organic, they feel like a screenwriter’s attempt at making a point about traits associated with men and women. What that point is, I have no idea.

The final act of Deadly Illusions is what has most people buzzing about this movie. I won’t spoil it but the approach to mental health in Deadly Illusions is like something out of a terrible 1990s thriller. You can probably guess what is coming but still, I don’t hate Deadly Illusions enough to spoil it. All I will say is that the ending is bad in the cheesiest, silliest and unintentionally comic fashion. Deadly Illusions wants to be taken seriously but as the ending flies off the rails it’s met with derisive laughter and not edge of your seat thrills.

Trashy, silly, over the top and unintentionally funny, Deadly Illusions is not a movie I can recommend unless you plan on watching it with friends eager to riff on the silliness. Watching Deadly Illusions alone is rather cringe worthy. I wanted to make fun of the movie but there wasn’t anyone to hear the many in the moment, you had to be there, quips. Instead, I watched Deadly Illusions in desperate confusion as the film’s lesbian fantasies confounded the narrative and the performances teetered over the top into camp.