'Beware of Mom' Review: Lifetime's thriller offers nothing more than a senile mother with temper issues
'Beware of Mom' opens with a gut-wrenching scene as it shows a house blow up and establishes it to be a staged attack by an unidentified person who is seen leaving the premises only moments before the blast. The movie progresses following the disturbing event to introduce us to the single working mother Tanya (Rene Ashton) and her 16-year-old daughter Kylie (Nicholas Langley).
Tanya is an overprotective mother who often restricts Kylie from getting herself involved with anyone that's not of her age, drawing examples from her own life from when she was a teenager. However, Kylie is highly bothered by her mother’s extreme behavior and doesn't miss out on any opportunity that would help her get out of the house.
Just when Kylie gets grounded for partying with older boys despite being warned against doing so by her mother, she runs into her new neighbors, a family of two comprising a mother and daughter. Anna (Crystal Allen) is a social media influencer who has moved into a new neighborhood with her teenage daughter Jessie (Monica Rose Betz) after losing her husband and daughter in a fire accident, the one which we were shown at the beginning of the movie.
It takes less than a few seconds for Anna to befriend Kylie and Tanya. Kylie soon becomes close friends with Jessie, a relationship forced upon her by her mother Anna as she seeks her dead daughter in Kylie. Anna goes out of her way to impress Kylie, including lending her dead daughter's party clothes and referring to her as their family. In Kylie's eyes, Anna becomes the cool mother she always wished to have, as opposed to her birth mother.
When Tanya witnesses Anna’s increasing influence on Kylie, she tries to cut ties with her neighbors, which further irks Anna. What next? Anna goes getting rid of anything and everything that would possibly stop her from making Kylie her daughter. She even poisons Tanya and pulls a knife on her own daughter when she tries to save Kylie.
Anyone seeing Anna’s bouts of insanity would realize that she's bogged down by something bigger than just the death of her husband and daughter. All along you’ll find yourself wondering if she murdered her family, and the movie concludes on the same note' as predicted. The title of the movie pretty much sums up everything it has to offer — the tale of a senile mother who could pose a danger to her own family and others.
Meanwhile, the plotline is straightforward with barely any twists, leaning more towards drama than suspense to make for a thriller movie. For those of you who have watched other Lifetime movies that premise on a similar theme, 'Beware of Mom' is bound to come across as disappointing. We have seen enough of good triumphs over evil. Perhaps, peeling different layers of evil, even at the cost of it being defeated could have added more edge to the story arc.
'Beware of Mom' premieres on August 15 at 8 pm ET on Lifetime.