A harrowing docudrama about Lost Girls, whose murders involve a whole community.
Lost Girls
Grade: B+
Director: Liz Garbus (Searching for Bobby Fischer)
Screenplay: Michael Werwie (Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile) from Robert Kolker’s Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery
Cast: Amy Ryan, Gabriel Byrne
Rating: R
Runtime: 95m
By: John DeSando
A docudrama about young girls caught up in prostitution and murdered has enough drama of itself without any filmmaker having to massage the details for more drama. In Netflix’s Lost Girls, experienced documentarian Liz Garbus directs an attention-grabbing docudrama set in 2010 among marshes of Long Island that includes a fierce mother looking for her sex-worker, Jersey City, Craigslist propositioning daughter.
Meanwhile, at least 4 bodies have been found, and the Suffolk County police are scrambling. The serial killer mystery is afoot based on a true story.
It’s unknown from the start who the murderer is, freeing Garbus to shift focus into the harrowing effect the losses have on the families and friends of the girls. Blue-collar Mari (Amy Ryan) has three daughters, one of whom, Shannan, has been missing in the vicinity of the burials. Mari is a bedraggled waitress in Ellenville tirelessly goading police to do more to find her while her story as a troubled single mother incrementally unfolds to bolster suspicions that her harried life is a contributor to Shannon’s unbalanced life.
Besides the drama of finding bodies under constantly overcast skies and learning more about Shannon’s last day, Garbus gives us suspicions about a possible murderer, Dr. Peter Hackett (Reed Birney). Living in this area of the Island, he cryptically called Mari the day of the disappearance. Although one scene shows him acting strangely, no real proof emerges.
The lack of firm proof and the reluctance of the police to act aggressively give the story dramatic energy. Commissioner Robert Dormer (Gabriel Byrne) embodies our frustrations of not being able to piece together the evidence or stop the determined Mari to cause as much heat as possible to ramp up the search. As Mari becomes the hero that forces the police to search further, we become aware of how difficult it is to find the missing girl and determine who is the murderer.
To add to the depression of the movie’s premise, scenes are largely gloomy, the town in decline, and the marshes forbidding and unforgiving. The police are slow to respond and jaded, but maybe understandably so given the naturally-slow evidence gathering and the pejorative “missing-prostitute” meme.
When we learn that Mari sent Shannan to foster homes because she couldn’t handle her bipolarity, we learn that losing girls is a mosaic of bad decisions and downtrodden lives.
Police are complacent and parents flawed. Lost Girls will always be a mystery, regardless of who does the murdering.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JohnDeSando62@gmail.com.
