Lifetime
Lifetime serves up another ‘Truly Unbelievable Movie’ from its ‘Ripped from the Headlines’ series of TV movies based on a true story that’s been completely fictionalized for television. Good luck on finding the actual source for this story.
In The Girl Who Wasn’t Dead, things kick off with 15-year-old Erica (Emma Tremblay) being discovered at a local motel with 21-year-old cutie Andrew (Kyle Clark), resulting in Andrew’s arrest and Erica being returned to her mother Carrie (Lyndsy Fonseca) with a warning from Detective Richards (Bronwen Smith) to get her daughter under control since this is the third time Erica has run away and police resources are needed for actual crimes (not that a 15-year-old shacking up with a 21-year-old isn’t a crime). After meeting up again with Andrew and him telling her that they need to put the brakes on because his relationship with a minor is going to hurt his future, Erica storms off and assures her mother that the two have broken up.
A month passes and Erica is a new girl, helpful at home and much happier in general so Carrie believes that they’ve finally turned a corner and Erica will not run away again. One day after school, Erica goes bowling with her bestie Liam (Richard Ortiz), and her behavior leads him to jokingly tell the shocked attendant that he’d ‘like to kill that bitch.’ Well, Erica doesn’t come home that night, or the next, etc. and Carrie has no choice but to go to the police again. This time the matter is more urgent as another local girl has also gone missing. In fact, there are several local girls now missing as the story spans three years. During that time, the bowling alley employee comes forward to the police (two years later and wearing the same outfit) after he remembered what Liam had said. The poor guy is brought in for questioning but Carrie ultimately bails him out, assuring the detective that Liam is like family (in fact, it was Liam who initially ratted out Erica at the beginning of the movie, fearing Andrew might kill her). Out of the blue, a prisoner comes forward with information about a man who claims to have killed all the missing girls including Erica, and provides the police with a map to the bodies. They find them all except for Erica, and at the murder trial the defense suddenly announces there has been a change and his client is not guilty of the murder of Erica as she enters the courtroom, stunning everyone including her parents.
That’s all in the first hour! The film actually rewinds back to the day Erica disappeared and shows us she returns to Andrew’s house and shacks up with him, basically making herself a prisoner in the home so no one knows where she is and splits them up again. But when Erica turns 18 and Andrew has a few drinks and admits to his co-worker — jokingly! — that the missing girl is and has been at his house, it’s only a matter of time before the police show up. Thanks to the construction of the story with the rewind, any tension that could have been carried out over the three year time period is broken because, well, we know how the story ends. But now that Erica is of legal age, will she return to Andrew, will that three years of self-imposed isolation have taken a toll on their relationship, or will true love prevail?
The Girl Who Wasn’t Dead falls squarely in the middle of Lifetime’s TV movies on the scale of Awful to Excellent. It’s not terrible, it’s not great, it just lands in the category of bland. That is mainly thanks to the film’s title which tells us right away that the girl is alive. Most of the tension in the story comes in the second half when we wonder if Erica’s isolation and Andrew’s growing distance — resorting to having a beer in the driveway just so he can have some ‘me time’ — will ultimately tear them apart and force Erica to reveal her ruse. Of course she also panics a little when everyone believes she’s dead, which Andrew thinks they can use to their advantage, but it doesn’t sit right with her. Another issue that works against the movie is the time span. Emma Tremblay, who is 20-years-old, has to play Erica from 15 to 18 … but she never convincingly looks like a 15-year-old. No one else in the film ages (or apparently changes clothes) during that three year span except little brother Joey, who experiences a major growth spurt and goes from Logan Pierce to Everett Andres. Of course as adults, we really don’t change that much in three years unless there have been some major influences on our lives, but in a TV movie they really need to do something to make the characters look three years older instead of three days. The only real passage of time comes when Carrie is driving Erica to school on a lovely Autumn day, and when they arrive it is clearly Summer.
Lyndsy Fonseca is fine as Carrie, making her a concerned mother without being hysterical. Tremblay may not look 15 but she convincingly plays an impulsive 15-year-old, so that at least helps make Erica feel a bit more believable. She actually does really well in the flashback part of the movie where she’s isolated from the world, home alone all day while Andrew is at work and needing his companionship when he comes home. Kyle Clark also acquits himself, never allowing Andrew to appear to be playing Erica for any reason (or is a predator), but also becoming harried when she can’t understand that even though she has all day to herself, between work and being home with her, he has no alone time and needs a little space once in a while. Bronwen Smith is appropriately curt with Carrie, feeling she and Erica are becoming nuisances until the other girls disappear, then willing to work with her and another mother to help find them, and Everett Andres has to play the grown up Joey with a huge chip on his shoulder for Erica taking away his childhood by disappearing. All in all, the cast does very well with the so-so material.
Director Simone Stock gets to do a few clever things when the story rewinds, showing us what we’ve already seen but from different angles, but there’s nothing else flashy going on. The script by Yuri Baranovsky and Angela Gulner does give Tremblay some decent material to work with but due to the structure of the story, there is little suspense to be had. In the end, it’s just simply … okay.
The Girl Who Wasn’t Dead has a run time of 1 hour 26 minutes, and is rated TV-PG.
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