Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Deadly Illusions’ on Netflix, in Which Kristen Davis Plays a Murder-Mystery Novelist Whose Life Becomes a Lot Like a Murder-Mystery Novel

Deadly Illusions has arrived on Netflix to (possibly) meet all your Preposterous Thriller needs! Inventory: You’ve got Kristen Davis and Dermot Mulroney as your cast anchors and Greer Grammer (daughter of Kelsey) as the chaos cog in the plot machine; a frustrated murder-mystery novelist; a smidge of marital discontent; a new nanny; and, oh boy, a butcher knife! Now let’s see if this all adds up to something watchable, or just a bunch of nice-naughty-nasty nanny nonsense.

DEADLY ILLUSIONS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Fog! It nestles atop a little coastal village consisting of large houses nestled cozily into a hillside, and a quaint downtown consisting of a couple dozen or so high-end boutiques, and it all screams, RICH PEOPLE LIVE HERE, and maybe that’s why the soundtrack moans with ominous tones? One of those storefronts is a mildly bustling bookstore, where a customer plucks the latest Mary Morrison novel from a display featuring a placard reading, PASSION, SEX, LIES, BETRAYAL. Just try to resist, bookshoppers! These stories must be juicy as a ripe peach, I tell you. Mary (Davis) lives nearby, in a neo-modern concrete manse with a shiny squeaky-clean garage floor, a kitchen that’s 87 percent polished steel and a thinking room and a writing room and a cigar-smoking room, which might all be the same room, but we see a lot of different angles here, so it’s hard to tell.

Anyway, her life is just the perfectest: Adorable fraternal-twin kids, a stockmucker or pay trader or whatever husband named Tom (Mulroney), early retirement, a tank of a Mercedes SUV on very clean wheels in that f—ing spotless garage, and two, count ’em, TWO turntables. Tom and Mary make good whoopie, the kids are non-entities who never spill anything in these immaculate interiors — like I said, perfect. Except Tom blew it on that thing, you know, that thing, and now she has to reluctantly succumb to her publisher’s overwhelming pressure to cash a $2 million advance and write another prurient slasher novel in her bestselling Delirium series. You do what you gotta do to keep that garage floor waxed, I guess.

Why such reluctance? “You’ve never seen me when I’m writing,” Mary tells her best friend Elaine (Shanola Hampton). “I turn into a different person.” And in order to make that transformation, Mary will need some help with the kids. Enter Of Course Her Name Is Grace (Grammer), the nanny who dropped off a cloud, fresh from heaven itself. She rolls in on her antique bicycle with bright blue eyes, blond ponytail and dowdy sweater, and just wows the crap out of Mary and the kids. Is she too good to be true? Never! Mary looks at Of Course Her Name Is Grace and the teakettle boils and whistles and she doesn’t notice the shrill warning. But I noticed. You’re damn right I noticed. It’s what you call foreshadowing, my friends. Because things are gonna get very hot, maybe too hot, and very soon, maybe too soon.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Deadly Illusions is a Preposterous Nanny Thriller like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle or The Babysitter (1995 Alicia Silverstone version, natch) crossed with a crazy-novelist movie like Secret Window or Wonder Boys or maybe even Adaptation or Barton Fink — although all these comparisons are a mite bit generous.

Performance Worth Watching: Anyone who can sit through this thing without cringing at least once deserves an honorary Oscar.

Memorable Dialogue: Mary takes Of Course Her Name Is Grace for a bra fitting:

Mary: “I remember when mine used to look like this.”

Of Course Her Name Is Grace: “I never understood why anyone wanted to go bigger. I can barely keep these in order.”

Sex and Skin: Mulroney butt, Davis frontboob and sideboob, low-angle bathing suit cheesecake, Mulroney under the $1,500 duvet as Davis gets giddy, Mulroney takes Davis in the pantry closet with her face shoved into the Ziplocs and Malt-O-Meal packs, Grammer dropping her hand in the water as she gives Davis a sugar-milk-and-honey bath, a little light S&M, some misc. groping.

Our Take: And those turntables are cheap. For someone who makes $2 million to write a shitty pageturner, you’d think she’d buy something with a decent tone arm. She obviously needs to upgrade her audio consultant, and downgrade the garage-cleaning consultant.

I nitpick, and I want to say I do so affectionately, but that’d be a lie. Deadly Illusions is a Basic Instinct-y thriller that has all manner of sex-and-skin moments that, in this post-50 Shades era, are tame as a pet bunny on sedatives. It’s all very lukewarm and faux-dirty, these are-they-dreams-or-are-they-real 20-times-removed quasi-Hitchcock scenes in which certain characters (yes, plural) succumb to Of Course Her Name Is Grace’s raging nubility. The movie oh-so-desperately wants to titillate and screw with us, in the scene where Mary lounges topless next to the pool writing her novel longhand in a notebook and asking Of Course Her Name Is Grace to rub suntan lotion on her back, in the scene where they go for a bike ride and have an idyllic picnic and read love poems aloud as the score blares minor-key drones in ham-fisted contrapuntal tones. These moments are uproarious for sure, but mostly because they suck.

The movie is very much a connect-the-dots paint-by-numbers fill-in-the-blank thriller, from the knife-slashy logo to the her-book-becomes-her-reality plot to its onslaught of raggedy-jaggedy final-act twists. The latter are ludicrous to the point of incomprehensibility, leaving us with a scrapheap of confusional kitsch littered with things that could be red herrings, but the lack of clarity renders us uncertain as to whether they’re actually red herrings or not — and wondering how the crap it all adds up and what the crap all this means. I think, and I say this with all the academic film-buff analytical muscle I can muster, it all means doodledy stinking squat. The movie begins with literal fog and ends with narrative fog. I laughed at it with incredulity, but more frequently found my face scrunched up like I just ate some bad chop suey.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Maybe Deadly Illusions good for a few LULZ, but it’s ultimately derivative and too silly for its own good.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Deadly Illusions on Netflix