Movie Review: Her Smart Phone, Smart House, Car and Business make Her Vulnerable to “The Admirer”

Someboy is stalking Nancy, messing with her Smart House, phone, work and home computers, her electric and electronically-wired-in car.

Somebody murdered her fiance the night before their wedding. Somebody is sabotaging her at work, setting traps in her personal life and framing others for the misdeeds.

And that somebody could be any one of four obvious suspects, or maybe somebody she hasn’t met yet.

Paranoid? She should be.

“The Admirer” is a cleverly-timed, well-structured but clumsily scripted and flatly played thriller about that almost universal paranoia about “wired” life. Every “smart” gadget in our lives is a “data breach” waiting to happen. Every one with a camera and/or a microphone is a privacy violation in progress.

Roxanne McKee (“Game of Thrones”) plays Nancy, who is on the phone Facetiming with her fiance (Lucas Aurelio) when a shadowy figure she sees rushes into view and pushes Ross right out a window.

A year later, the cops never caught anybody or took her “stalker/murderer” story seriously. And it’s starting up again.

Missteps at work, settings changing on the themostat, water temp for her showers and music volume in her house, anonymous “secret admirer” flower deliveries at the office — who could be doing this?

Might it be the backstabbing subordinate, Sarah (Christina Bennington), the “unstable” IT guy/lover Doug (Jack Parr) who just got fired, brittle boss Gina (Tina Cascia), new IT guy Martin (Richard Fleeshman), Nancy’s all-access personal assistant Simon (Jordan Ford Silver)?

Nancy’s going to be the last one to figure out everything is out to get her.

“My house is trying to kill me!”

Her “You can’t trust anyone” is meant to be a complaint about her love life. Maybe she’d better apply that more broadly.

Some cop is going to assure her “You’re going to be OK. I’ll make sure of it.”

And somebody better call HR, because this ad-agency of the over-dressed is a minefield of inappropriate relationships and unprofessionalism.

Director Martin Makariev filmed this Rolfe Kanefsky and Chris Philip script with “Lifetime Original Movie” parameters — no swearing, no skin, no sex, mostly off-camera, with only a few smatterings of blood.

That isn’t the reason it plays so emotionally dry or that it struggles so much to create suspense. Everything feels articifial and bloodless, even the murders.

“Peaky Blinders” alumnus Parr has the only role with real rough edges, and even dangerous IT Doug should be afraid of this “work enemy” or that boss quick to blame everybody else.

I invested in figuring out whodunit. But the “talking villain” finale is an eye roller and that’s just indicative of what a slick, soap operatic melodrama “The Admirer” is, pretty much start to finish.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Roxanne McKee, Tina Casciani, Christina Bennington, Jack Parr, Jordan Ford Silver and Richard Fleeshman.

Credits: Directed by Martin Makariev, scripted by Rolfe Kanefsky and Chris Philip. A FilmRise release.

Running time: 1:29

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About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine
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