ix-year-old cousins David (Ryland Thiessen) and Sarah (Wilson) are best friends and even closer than their identical twin mothers, Heather and Erica (Raver). The day after a Halloween party, Heather is walking David to school when he is struck down in a terrible accident. David's death devastates everyone except Sarah, who says she knows what happened because David told her in a dream. Erica and her husband Edgar (Rick Roberts) are concerned about their daughter, but they think that's just her way of dealing with the bad news.
Six weeks later, Sarah still talks about David as if he were there with her, and she puts out cereal for him in the morning. When Sarah and Erica go to visit Heather, she's distraught. She tells Erica she doesn't want to lose the memory of David and that she can't find his toy robot, Robbie. Almost as if she knows just where to look, Sarah brings the toy to her.
Erica and Edgar visit a child psychologist to discuss Sarah, but the psychologist tells them to do nothing. However, when Sarah acts out at school and knocks another student off the monkey bars, even the normally calm Edgar is upset, and both parents decide they are not going to let Sarah continue to act as if David's still alive.
The couple agree that it might be a good idea for Erica and Sarah to go to the family's lakeside cabin for the summer to get away from the city. However, almost instantly Heather arrives, too. As the summer passes by, Sarah and Heather grow closer, and Erica starts to feel isolated and lonely. It doesn't take long before Erica comes to believe something is terribly wrong, suspecting that Heather just might be trying to keep David alive through her daughter no matter what the cost.
Raver does double duty
Haunting Sarah is the perfect Lifetime movie. It has some aspects of a thriller, but it's really a family drama about sisters and the most unfair tragedy of all, the death of a child. Still, there's no gore factor, and there's no real bad guy here. Haunting Sarah lives and dies based on Kim Raver's performance as both Erica and Heather, and she brings both characters to life effectively.
The screenplay, based on Lisa Gunwald's novel New Year's Eve, is tightly written, and we get a sense of Erica's horror as she watches forces she can't control take over her daughter. While it's effective, it still feels as if a chunk of the story is missing. We don't really know enough about the past relationship between Heather and Erica. In fact, we don't learn much about Heather at all, since we spend most of our time with Erica. And since the story starts with David's death, we don't learn much about him either. That missing piece takes away some of the power this story could have had.
However, Raver's dual performances are right on the mark, and she makes us care about both her characters. While her hair is usually swept up for Heather and down around her shoulders as Erica, her body language gives us an even better hint of which character is which. It's amazing that she's able to create the tension she does between the two characters, especially considering that both performances were filmed separately and later put together. It's all seamless and feels real.
Beyond that, tiny Niamh Wilson as Sarah has a natural quality that makes us fear for her, and director Ralph Hemecker has done a great job of bringing out a terrific performance in her. Hemecker also takes Haunting Sarah beyond the normal TV movie standards, using odd angles and lighting to make everything seems just a bit spookier than it might otherwise.
