Coming three years after Casa de mi Padre and a week before The Spoils Before Dying, A Dangerous Adoption suggests that Will Ferrell and his sometime partner in crime Kristen Wiig are determined to spoof every last TV genre they can lay their hands on. Ferrell’s Casa De Mi Padre took the Latin American telenovela to the woodshed, while The Spoils of Babylon (The Spoils Before Dying being a sequel) went toe-to-toe with big-budget epic miniseries of the 1970s and 80s like The Thornbirds and oligarchic oilpatch melodramas like Dallas. A Dangerous Adoption is an altogether different bird: a satire of Lifetime Channel TV movies.

It’s a tricky prospect, because Lifetime movies have a formula so solid you sometimes feel they arrive pre-satirised, with many a knowing wink and a whole set of genre staples, tics and tropes. The titles alone give you some idea – in most cases they double as pitch and plot: I Killed My BFF, The Wife He Met Online, Babysitter’s Black Book, Fifteen and Pregnant, Kept Woman, Sexting in Suburbia, and Men Are Terrible and Will Hurt You Because This is Lifetime (oh wait, that was the Lifetime movie spoof on Family Guy). It’s a heady mix of women’s issues, women’s nightmares and all manner of “female trouble.” Its ancestors are old-school network made-for-TV movies, 1980s “Disease-of-the-Week” melodramas, the telenovela-lite, and over-ripe, over-sexed After School Specials. And it draws a steady sub-audience of fans who watch ironically or satirically, eagle-eyed for those long meaningful pauses, murdery double-entendres, weak male leads and instantly recognisable narrative shorthand. You could call it an upscale housewives-choice channel, I suppose, but it’s sassy enough to draw in those husbands – and others, too – thus compounding an already enviable demographic for advertisers. Oh yes, Lifetime knows its audience.

And so do Ferrell and Wiig, two of the greatest all-round utility players Saturday Night Live ever unearthed. They play Robert and Sarah Benton, he the successful author of Debt: Not Just a Four-Letter Word, she the owner of a small organic-farming business, who have never recovered from a collapsing-dock incident that caused Sarah to lose their second baby five years ago. (Talking of narrative shorthand, that dock-collapse and baby-loss is deftly wrapped up in under three minutes of pre-credits.) Stricken by grief and with a deep, unacknowledged chasm yawning between them (despite their relentlessly sunny, prosperous-bourgeois exteriors and lifestyle) and with Sarah unable to conceive, they elect to seek a surrogate mother, who arrives in the form of Brigitte (Jessica Lowndes) all Megan Fox lips and naked provocation. We know she’s trouble the minute she shows up, but they take pity on her and bring her into their home.

So where are they taking us with this? Robert is a repressed bore, worthily bearded and with the dreary, finger-wagging demeanour of a catatonic Mike Farrell, while Sarah is a relentlessly upbeat all-day smiler. Brigitte’s arrival, in pointedly virginal white dress, sets up any number of possibilities for later. What is she after? Is she psychotic or simply criminal? Is that baby a cushion? If her plans all go pear-shaped, who will she knock off first? Robert and Sarah’s diabetic elder daughter Sully? Sarah’s kind-hearted but suspicious gay business partner? Robert? Sarah? Does Brigitte have some prior connection with Robert? Whatever did he get up to on those long nationwide book tours? How long will it be until he breaks his fragile sobriety? (Spoiler alert: he necks his first scotch at precisely the half-way point.) Who is Brigitte’s creepy, scrofulous and heavily tattooed trailer-trash boyfriend? And will peace ever be restored to Robert and Sarah’s tranquil life on the shores of – uh-oh – Lake Storm?

With A Deadly Adoption, has Lifetime finally become self-aware? Read more

It all burns quite slowly at first, with director Rachel Lee Goldenberg (who earned her spurs at cheapo pocket-studio The Asylum) savouring the genre’s trademarks; there are ominous orchestrations, deafeningly loud narrative telegraphing, inept stuntwork and oodles of faux-sincerity yet to come. Everything soon points at a classic domestic-intruder thriller, in the manner of Orphan, The Stepfather or the neglected Gary Busey classic Hider in the House, plus maybe a light soupçon of Fatal Attraction, all with tongue lightly but firmly in cheek. To say the least, Brigitte – if that’s even her real name – is certainly a piece of work (as you can tell whenever she screams “DON’T CALL ME CRAZY!!”). Before the feathers fly and the going gets really crazy, though, we get to savour the infinite ridiculousness of Ferrell’s fake beard, which is funnier every time you see it, and his absurdly stiff and pompous way of carrying himself – even in a supposedly suspenseful boat chase late in the movie, his face is emotionally frozen solid, his eyes perfectly dead, for three lengthy shots in succession.

Writer Andrew Steele mostly keeps to the Lifetime format but salts his dialogue with pungent little bon mots and dialogue exchanges. A claustrophobic storage closet encounter between Robert and Brigitte hinges wildly around the phrases “It must be hard … ” [looooong pause] and “SPF 50 - is that enough?” And Ferrell can really sell a line like “You know the dangers of diabetic kitoacidosis!” Meanwhile, the Lifetime staples keep coming: damnit, no cell reception in this area! A twig snaps deafeningly! A gunshot in the woods followed by a cutaway and the sound of scattering birds! A montage song straight out of 1996 Lillith Fair! Plus guilty secrets, a hidden betrayal, a shocking revelation … Who could ask for more?

Everyone involved plays it magnificently straight, allowing subtle satire to eat gently away at the edges of the story and its telling, while most of the comic rewards derive from the film-makers’ and performers’ slavish and knowing adherence to the tropes of the genre. It’s a risky proposition as comedy – little of it is, as they say, laugh-out-loud funny - but it’s a slow-burning hoot that never overplays its hand.