Melanie is a successful ad agency executive and a loving wife to Alex and a caring mother to little Tina. But Melanie is also a trusting soul who believes in the inherent goodness in human nature. She comes into conflict with a personal assistant with a contrary world view as a firm believer in "Darwinism." "The Wrong Mommy" is the clash of those two human souls with different vantage points on life.

The drama unfolds with Melanie's hiring of Phoebe Sutton, who has a magnetic personality and an enthusiasm that seems infectious. But appearances are deceiving when Phoebe begins to angle for Melanie's job and even her role as Alex's wife and Tina's mother. Driven by a deep-seated neurosis, it is Phoebe who is "the wrong mommy."

The backstory of the lives of Melanie and Phoebe includes both girls having lost a parent. But their lives took completely different directions. The screenplay was effective in bringing things to a head and revealing how the two characters were more closely tied genetically than we ever would have expected.

There were some loose ends in the film, including what happened to poor Jason, Melanie's co-worker who was stabbed in his apartment by Phoebe. Did Jason survive? Also, it was not make clear why Carol Graham, the mother of both Melanie and Phoebe (Lisa), would not have intervened after the deaths of the grandparents, which was the pivotal moment when Lisa was sent into the brutal living conditions of depraved foster parents.

When Melanie first meets Phoebe, she says, "I have a good feeling about her." But she failed check her background and allowed Phoebe to worm her way deep into her personal and professional life. She could have taken away greater life lessons from her encounter with a step-sister who lived in a different world. On multiple occasions, Phoebe reminds Melanie about how fortunate she is and how grateful she should be to have such a wonderful life. It is not clear if that message ever completely registered.