Parents' Guide to Husband Father Killer: The Alyssa Pladl Story

Lifetime dramas are usually simplistic and melodramatic, yet watchable, but this one is an outlier, mixing stiff acting, dreadful dialogue, and confusing direction. So many questions are raised that the film never attempts to answer. When Steven deliberately gets his underaged daughter drunk at a bar, why doesn't Alyssa call the girl's adoptive parents to step in and help? Why aren't they informed when Steven starts having sex with the girl? Why is it that both Steven and Katie act as if they'd never heard that fathers having sex with their daughters might not be a good, or legal, thing? Why does Steven talk about marrying his own daughter as if he'd never heard about laws against it? Why is Steven let out of jail and given custody of his baby?

Perhaps there are great explanations for all of this, but they aren't offered here. To add to the confusing tone, weird threatening music can come up suddenly and inappropriately, like when someone is about to do something as innocuous as open a mailbox. The same combination of dissonant strings is heard out of nowhere when Steven is innocently dining with his kids, and it continues through a transition to newly single Alyssa out on a first date. The use of dramatic music there feels misleading, as if the filmmakers don't know what the movie is about.