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| AMY RYAN as MARI and THOMASSIN MCKENZIE as SHERRE in 'LOST GIRLS' |
‘LOST GIRLS’ is a Netflix movie about the true story of girls lost in New York’s Long Island and a mother’s search for her missing daughter in 2010. It’s based on the book “Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery” by Robert Kolker.
The mother is Mari Gilbert (played by Amy Ryan, best known for her Oscar-nominated role in ‘Gone, Baby, Gone’), a single mom who holds two jobs as a construction worker by day and a waitress at a diner by night.
She is forced to act on her own after she felt that the police are not doing enough to solve the case of her missing daughter.
Her eldest daughter, Shannan, is the one who goes missing and it turns out that Shannan works as a prostitute. She has two younger daughters and is struggling as a blue-collar single mother.
Her eldest is Shannan, followed by Sherre (Thomasin McKenzie of “Jojo Rabbit”) and the youngest is Sarra (Oona Laurence), who takes medication for an undisclosed illness. Shannan is supposed to have dinner at their home but she doesn’t show up so Mari searches for her.
When cops appear to be lazy in their work to look for her daughter, who they dismissed as just a missing hooker, Mari becomes more pushy and persistent.
She hounds them and posts fliers of her missing daughter everywhere, demanding that commissioner Richard Dormer (Gabriel Byrne), whose about to be replaced for mismanaging his position, exert more effort in pursuing the case. The cops then unearthed four bodies dumped along a highway, all women who were escorts for hire.
Mari makes a lot of noise and the cops try to discredit he as she gave Shannan away as a child. Shannan is bipolar and moved from one foster home to another.
At first, Mari refused to be in the company of the family members of the other murdered victims in a public vigil, but she is convinced by Sherre to participate and the news media helps in fostering more awareness about their plight and the serial killings that have gone on for years.
Some clues are found but the investigation doesn’t really bring them anywhere and Shannan remains missing, which makes the film frustrating to watch since it doesn’t have a satisfying closure and more bodies are discovered.
But it’s still worth watching because of Amy Ryan’s very committed performance as Mari. We just wish we’re given more background details about her, like how come she’s raising her three daughters alone? Where is their dad and what happened to him and Mari?
Amy never goes over the top as Mari. Her underplaying as the beleaguered mother actually gives her scenes a quiet but smoldering intensity.
You can actually feel her pain and outrage, like when she tells the commissioner: “I have a talent for holding grudges. And unless you help me, I’m gonna raise more hell than you can handle.”
“Lost Girls” is the directorial narrative film debut of a documentarist, Liza Garbus, and its takes on a compelling feministic tone as she shows how women, specially the poorer ones, are often marginalized by men who are in a position of power and don’t really care enough.
In the postscript, the story of the grieving Mari becomes even more heartbreaking as it’s revealed that her youngest daughter is actually schizophrenic and this condition eventually led to the accidental death of Mari in 2016.
