Overexposed is a 2018 Lifetime Movie of the Week Thriller written and directed by Conor Allyn.
Erin Prescott (Mary Katherine Duhon) is a high school student and the daughter of Sheila Prescott (Marguerite Moreau), the sheriff of Grassford County, who's running for re-election. After going on a date with hunky classmate and school baseball star Taylor Cowls (Sam Chance), he and Erin engage in a sexting session that climaxes with Taylor coercing Erin into sending some racy selfies. After opting out of attending a campaign rally for her mom with the excuse of doing homework, Erin invites Taylor to her house, but after he tries to force her into non-consensual sex, a chain of events ends with Erin accidentally killing Taylor, then disposing of his body in a shallow grave. Unaware that her daughter is the culprit, Sheila investigates the death with her deputy Stuart Shelby (David Maldonado), who also happens to be her election opponent. Meanwhile, Taylor's brother Jimmy (Jake Allyn) mourns the death and strikes up a flirtation with Erin, who tries to keep a straight face as she's wracked by guilt.
Overxposed contains examples of:
- Antihero: Erin is presented as the Gray side of a Black-and-Gray Morality situation. Taylor clearly slid way over into Questionable Consent by urging Erin to take explicit selfies for him, assuming it gave him a green light to have sex with her, and threatening to send the pictures to everyone if she didn't let him do what he wanted. But Erin's actions following Taylor's fatal fall—not calling for help, then burying the body in the woods and trying to cover it all up—are nonetheless unsettling. Then her relationship with Jimmy, which does end up in a sexual encounter, is very ill-advised.
- Asshole Victim:
- Taylor, a pornographer and would-be rapist, accidentally dies by Erin's hand.
- Also arguably the case for Joanna, who gets killed after participating in Erin's cover-up and showing no sympathy for Taylor's grieving father.
- Beauty Is Bad: The two main villains, the Cowls brothers, are handsome.
- Blackmail Backfire: Taylor's sexting scheme is to get girls to send him lewd pics, then coerce them into sex by threatening to send them out to others. While it's worked in the past, with Erin it ends up costing him his life.
- Burner Phones: Used by Jimmy to send Erin's sexting photos back to her, then out to the entire school.
- Darker and Edgier: For a Lifetime movie, this is notable for centering on a sensational, but fairly plausible and realistic, scenario and featuring a deeply-flawed protagonist.
- Date Rape Averted: Invited into Erin's bedroom, Taylor tries to seduce her, but she stops him. He tries to argue that the selfies she sent him amounted to consent, and she reluctantly goes along before stopping him again. Angrily, he threatens to send the selfies to his baseball teammates, which leads to his accidental death.
- Death by Falling Over: Erin physically confronts Taylor as he tries to send out her selfies, causing him to fall down the staircase at the Prescott house, which kills him.
- Dictionary Opening: The movie opens with some text discussing how prevalent sexting is among teens, to explain exactly what the word "sexting" means.
- Dramatic Irony: The movie runs on the drama of Sheila investigating a death that she doesn't know her daughter is responsible for.
- Freudian Excuse: While the movie doesn't use it to excuse his actions, it establishes that Taylor's mother died a few years earlier and it threw the Cowls family into turmoil, especially his deranged brother Jimmy.
- Greater-Scope Villain: Taylor's sexual misdeeds are revealed to have been based on techniques taught to him by his older brother Jimmy.
- How We Got Here: The movie opens with Erin waking up in the woods in the middle of the night as a man digs a shallow grave, then backtracks to explain why it's happening.
- Intimate Telecommunications: The entire plot is kicked off by a sexting session between Erin and Taylor in which he asks her for sexy selfies. It later comes to light that Taylor has done this to a number of other girls at his school.
- It Always Rains at Funerals: Variation, as it rains at the candlelight vigil for Taylor.
- Jerkass Has a Point: In the Motive Rant, the evil Jimmy notes that, apart from what happened to cause Taylor's death, Erin deciding to cover up the crime and dispose of the body was a morally repugnant move and a violation of basic human dignity.
- Killed Offscreen: Joanna disappears, and it's only later that her body is discovered.
- Lack of Empathy: While attending the vigil for Taylor, Joanna remarks that she wants to see Taylor's father realize he would never see his son again.
- Mama Bear: After learning that Erin is in trouble, Sheila goes into this mode for the final act.
- Motive Rant: Jimmy gives one to Erin at the climax, mixed with a convoluted "The Reason You Suck" Speech and a lot of Monster Misogyny about girls and sex.
- New Media Are Evil: It's a cautionary tale about sexting, though instead of just the practice itself, the focus is on the possible negative consequences of it.
- No Communities Were Harmed: The only in-story indication of the movie's setting is that it takes place in fictional Grassford County, but the movie itself doesn't really try to hide that it was filmed in the town of Guthrie, Oklahoma (in Logan County). The Guthrie water tower even shows up in an establishing shot.
- Police Procedural: It starts as a Reverse Whodunnit, with Sheila and Shelby investigating Taylor's death though the audience knows what happened, then the death of Joanna poses an actual mystery to be investigated.
- Pop-Up Texting: Used throughout to show the texts and photos being shared.
- Red Herring:
- In-Universe, the death of Joanna in the wake of Taylor's death leads everyone to think a Serial Killer is on the loose, when she was actually killed by Jimmy.
- The movie itself does this, since Jimmy and Deputy Shelby both have access to the selfies Erin took and both have a motive to murder Joanna—Jimmy to avenge Taylor's death, Shelby to make it look like a crime wave is sweeping through the county so he can unseat Sheila in the election, so it's not clear up until the climax which one is the killer, or even if they might be acting in cahoots. Ultimately, Jimmy is the villain and Shelby is innocent.
- Sacrificial Lion: While Taylor's death sets the story in motion, the murder of Joanna kicks it into high gear.
- Slut-Shaming: The whole town does it to the girls who are revealed to have been sexting with Taylor.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: A variation on this, as Erin asks her mother some pointed hypothetical questions about how she would investigate a murder, to help in her cover-up of Taylor's death. In answering them, Sheila makes a Tempting Fate remark about how rare murders are in the town. When Taylor's body is found, presumably the Weirdness Censor prevented Sheila from remembering the conversation and looking into her daughter's possible involvement.
- Too Dumb to Live: Joanna starts talking to Jimmy after word gets out about the other girls Taylor sexted with, not knowing that he's out for revenge, and he kills her.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
- Rachel is a bit of a Shipper on Deck for the deadly Erin/Taylor pairing.
- Joanna tells Jimmy that Erin killed Taylor, leading to Jimmy seducing Erin then attempting to murder her.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Erin's bubbly friend Rachel appears like she's going to be a major character in her early scenes, but then largely disappears in the second half of the movie.
- Woman Scorned: Erin confides in her friend Joanna, one of Taylor's other conquests, that she killed him, and Joanna gleefully helps her bury the body.
