The Long Island area has an uncaught serial killer. Whoever it is has been leaving the bodies of mostly prostitutes for 20 years. There are somewhere between 10 and 16 victims. And authorities don’t seem to be any closer to catching this person today than they were when the killing started. Every so often, local news will report a new body has been found.
The new movie Lost Girls takes up that story, but it doesn’t focus on law enforcement so much as it does on the mother of one victim, a woman who will not rest until justice is done, even if the local cops don’t care.
Blue collar worker Mari Gilbert (Amy Ryan) has a rather average life. She’s doing what she can to raise two daughters (Thomasin McKenzie and Oona Laurence), but one rather ordinary morning, something happens. Her eldest daughter Shannan, a young woman Mari has had little to do with in years, seems to be missing. Multiple people called Mari’s house overnight looking for Shannan, and Mari, well, she thinks something’s up. That something soon turns out to be foul play, but the real problem isn’t so much finding her missing child, dead or alive. It may be getting the local police, led by Gabriel Byrne’s Commissioner Dormer, to actually care enough to look. After all, it seems Shannan was possibly a prostitute, and it’s hard enough getting cops to care about one of them gone missing as it is.
It soon becomes apparent that Shannan isn’t the only missing girl. Someone is making young women, prostitutes for the most part, disappear. And while the missing women all have survivors to mourn them, if the cops won’t, then Mari, dragging her two other girls along most of the time, will have to make them care.
Now, this is based on a true story, so anyone hoping to see the killer unmasked will be disappointed. Much like David Fincher’s Zodiac, the movie hints at someone as a prime suspect, but the killer is never unmasked. That’s fine. It’s not the story about finding the killer. It’s the story of Mari Gilbert, who tragically died when her youngest, schizophrenic daughter stabbed her to death, and how she won’t quit on finding a daughter who arguably wanted nothing to do with her for the longest time before her disappearance. Mari spends all her time either bugging the cops to look into leads or finding leads on her own.
To that end, Amy Ryan is fantastic in this one. She has some slow burning fire in her, one that won’t take excuses either from the hotheaded idiot cop who seems to be lead investigator or the slim excuses Byrne’s commissioner keeps asking. And when she isn’t there, she’s talking to locals, getting answers, and all she wants more than anything else is to find out where her daughter went. The real tragedy isn’t just the death of a woman. It’s that no one cared enough to look into it until one woman decided someone had to.
Grade: B+
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