Movie Review :: Lifetime’s Girl in the Cellar

Lifetime

If you’re a girl and you’re going to be the subject of a Lifetime movie, to quote Oda Mae Brown — ‘You in danger,’ because the network has made a cottage industry out of its ‘Girl In’ movies including Girl in the Attic, Girl in the Garage, The Girl Locked Upstairs, Girl in the Video, Girl in Room 13, Girl in the Basement, Girl in the Bunker, Girl in the Box and Girl in the Shed, among others. That warning still stands with the latest ‘Girl In’ thriller, Girl in the Cellar (though technically it’s a bunker).

Kyla Pratt and Kelcey Mawema star as mother and daughter Rebecca and Lory. Lory is a star on the high school track team — although Rebecca has no idea she’s been booted as the captain, a secret that will come back to haunt Lory — and she seems to have caught the eye of cute boy from the wrong side of the tracks, Austin (Kyle Clark), something Rebecca is not happy about. Once they get home, Rebecca gives Lory a chance to admit to losing the captain’s spot on the team, but Lory thinks she’s referring to her relationship with Austin, which only makes Rebecca even more angry because now this is two secrets Lory has kept from her mother, who sees the two as best friends rather than parent and child, and best friends don’t lie to each other. Lory is grounded, briefly, but after many apologies Rebecca backs down on the punishment and has a surprise for her daughter — a prom dress, the one Lory picked out a while back and Rebecca bought, keeping it hidden as a surprise. And Rebecca even gives Lory permission to go to the prom with ‘that boy’, and will allow Lory to sat out until 11:30. Also, Rebecca will be a chaperone at the prom. Later that night, Austin shows up at the house, throwing pebbles at Lory’s bedroom window to get her attention. She sneaks downstairs and he asks her to come with him to his eighteenth birthday party (regular Lifetime viewers will remember that Clark played a 21-year-old in The Girl Who Wasn’t Dead), which she does, thinking her mother wouldn’t notice. But she does and when Lory returns home she is in very hot water. Compounding the matter is a text Rebecca saw from Austin talking about having a hotel room booked for prom night and then they were off to California. Not on her watch. Rebecca is furious about all of these secrets and no amount of ‘I’m sorry’ is going to calm her down.

Lifetime

The next morning Rebecca tells Lory to get dressed in something she doesn’t mind getting dirty, despite the fact that Lory has track practice in a couple of hours. They drive to an old farm which turns out to be Rebecca’s old family farm which had been severely damaged by a fire and uninhabitable. Undamaged is the fallout shelter Rebecca’s father had constructed, complete with a cot and a ‘gravity compost toilet’, which the family used more for storage. At least that’s what Rebecca tells Lory. As her daughter looks around the room, Rebecca drops a duffel bag down from above with food and water, notifying Lory that she will be staying in the bunker until after prom, which is two days away. Rebecca isn’t just angry about the lies, she’s angry that the lies have turned Rebecca into the type of parent she never wanted to be, the type of parent like her own that would lock their child in a windowless, inescapable bunker. (One minor plot hole here — if Rebecca never wanted to imprison her daughter in the bunker, why is there a security camera in place which she can access wirelessly to communicate with Lory by her phone or computer? This tech would not have been available when she was a child, so it could not have been installed by her parents. She went through all that trouble to have it installed — she could not have done it herself because she would not have had the knowledge or skill to connect the camera to the needed electrical wiring — just in case? Just askin’.) Rebecca still attends the prom as a chaperone — wearing the dress she bought for Lory (well overlook the fact that Pratt and Mawema have two completely different body types) — telling Austin and the other mothers that Lory was not feeling well and is at home. Austin tries calling Lory several times to check up on her and after receiving no answer he decides to go to the house and see for himself if she’s okay. After getting no answer at the door, he makes his way into the house through the garage and discovers Lory is not there. Panicked, he returns to the prom and alerts Rebecca that Lory may have been abducted. And he’s also alerted the police, which complicates Rebecca’s plans more than she ever anticipated.

Once the police and the media get involved, things spiral out of control as a missing person search goes into action. Detective Lawrence (Heather Doerksen) notifies Rebecca that Austin has been cleared of any wrong-doing and asks her to make a public statement because hearing directly from the parent often helps bring a missing child home (some believe she may have just run away). Rebecca has no choice now but to play along, visiting Lory to bring her more supplies (like dehydrated food and water) and tell her she’ll have to stay in the bunker a little longer than planned. Things take another unexpected turn when Austin shows up and begins doing some yard work for Rebecca, Lory’s disappearance now bringing the two closer together. Maybe a bit too close because the longer Lory is gone, the more intimate Rebecca and Austin become, to the point that he’s sleeping with her and basically living at the house. Now suddenly the center of attention, and months having passed since Lory disappeared, the police have gone over budget and can’t spend any more time looking for Lory. Austin continues to help out around the house, and service Rebecca as well, but he begins to grow suspicious when he discovers a box of the dehydrated food under the kitchen sink. Rebecca tells him they bought it for a camping trip that never happened, but then he later sees Rebecca’s laptop with the security camera turned on in the bunker, pretty certain that the person he sees is Lory. Rebecca realizes that she left the laptop open and runs upstairs but she finds Kyle under the bathroom sink fixing another pipe so she believes he did not see anything. But Austin hightails it back to the detective to tell her what he saw. Unfortunately he can’t tell her where the room is or if he really did see Lory, but Lawrence assures him they will look into things a bit more. Lawrence had paid a visit to Rebecca and spotted Austin leaving the house, which she thought was suspicious, and tells Rebecca that despite what she believes, they have not given up on the search for Lory because something just isn’t sitting right with the detective. She feels like she’s missing something. Now fearing that things will come crashing down around her, and enjoying the attention from the media and Austin, Rebecca visits Lory one last time and tells her it’s too dangerous for her to return and for Rebecca to thrive, Lory must die. Rebecca also reveals that her parents were abusive and kept her in the bunker, and it was she who rained down fiery retribution on them by burning down the farm while they slept. She is now willing to sacrifice her own daughter now, believing that will bring her true happiness.

Armed with the information from Austin, Lawrence and a Junior Detective begin digging into Rebecca’s background, including birth and marriage records, eventually learning that her family name is Johnson (she has been using her late husband’s last name) and that she is connected to the farm that burned down and killed her parents. Austin also gives Lawrence package of the dehydrated food and explains the camping trip story but produces a receipt for the purchase of thirty boxes — he only saw the one — from around the time Lory disappeared. This seems to be the evidence Lawrence needs to confront Rebecca, but with close to a year having passed since prom night, will they be able to find Lory before it’s too late?

Lifetime

Girl in the Cellar is a very well-made thriller, purported to be based on true stories (plural!) which is troubling. So we have to put aside the fact that there are multiple parents out there imprisoning their children to focus on the fictionalized situation created for entertainment purposes. The screenplay by Eva Gonzalez Szigriszt builds a mostly believable relationship between mother and daughter, even as Rebecca begins to become unhinged which should have been all kinds of red flags for Lory. Even the relationship that develops between Rebecca and Austin feel organic, at one point Austin telling Rebecca that he reminds her so much of Lory so of course the 18-year-old hormones are going to kick in. The script also does a good job of just subtly depicting Rebecca as a mother who is living vicariously through her daughter, pushing her — manipulating her — to be the person Rebecca was unable to be because of her traumatic childhood. It shows that trauma begets trauma, and no matter how much Rebecca fought the instincts and the deep-seated rage she carried from her abuse, it was inevitably going to get released at the first signs of her teenage daughter simply being a teenager who wants to live her own life. Lory is forced to walk a tightrope between the unsustainable ‘friendship’ relationship Rebecca has imposed on her and just being a normal high schooler with friends and a cute boy interested in her, even if he does come from a trailer park environment. Austin is also written as a really good guy, which is refreshing. He’s not out to just conquer Lory and ditch her after prom night, he truly cares about her and the closeness he finds with Rebecca in his sadness about Lory’s disappearance feels natural as he’s now just focused on his job and doing what he can around the house to help Rebecca. That things turn romantic doesn’t seem all that far-fetched. The only character that comes off badly is Detective Lawrence, especially in how she talks to Austin, before finally deciding to take some action. And of course those little too convenient plot holes regarding the security camera and the prom dress (that one could have been solved if we’d seen a duplicate dress in Rebecca’s closet). There may also be questions about the battery life of the lantern Lory has in the bunker, as well as the old car battery she finds and is able to connect to the one light source in the bunker. Those things don’t last long without an alternator continually converting mechanical energy into electrical energy to charge the battery. Also, we’re left hanging as to the relationship between Lory and Austin, and although he is seen from behind in the final scene, we never know if Lory finds out about his relationship with Rebecca. We see her embraced by her friends but not him. Overall, it’s a very good script and director Robert Adetuyi also does a great job at bringing it all to life.

The main cast is also excellent and makes even the most unbelievable parts of the story believable. Kyla Pratt is the absolute focus of the movie and she commands every scene she’s in. Her relationship with Lory is authentic, and Pratt manages to show Rebecca’s rage in such a calm manner that makes it all the more frightening, and when she realizes she is now the center of attention, she gives the creepiest little smile. And the way she can so easily discard her daughter is disturbing and Pratt pulls it all off with great skill. Kelcey Mawema also does a great job as Lory. Up to the point of where the story begins, we have to assume through her performance that she and her mother are the best of friends. She doesn’t seem even the least bit jumpy or fearful of her mother, but perhaps she has been manipulated all these years without realizing it. When Lory just does things a teenager does, she then has to grovel and beg for forgiveness, she takes the blame for upsetting her mother but then she goes back to being a compliant child. If she dares talk back to her mother, Mawema does subtly show some fear of retribution so perhaps that relationship has not been a friendly, or even parental, as we’ve been led to believe. She also handles the fear and terror of being not only trapped but discarded very authentically, her cries of forgiveness just tearing at your heart. Her reaction in the final scene feels real and is totally earned, and Mawema does a great job from beginning to end, showing us how completely the experience changes Lory. Kyle Clark is also terrific as Austin. He has such a sincerity about him that you can’t help but be on his side while Rebecca sees him as not good enough for her daughter. Clark makes us believe that Austin truly does have feelings for Lory, he makes the bond that forms between Austin and Rebecca feel authentic, even when he’s going where he should not go, and we feel for him when Austin feels that he is clearly not being taken seriously by the police. He is so good that we feel a bit cheated when Austin’s story gets left in the dust without any kind of resolution. Heather Doerksen has the thankless role of Detective Lawrence, playing the part perhaps a little too hard-nosed and with very little compassion toward both Rebecca and Austin, especially when she gives notice that the investigation has no leads and has gone over budget, making it seem like they are dropping the case. And then she gets a little pissy with Rebecca for calling out the police and urging the public to help find Lory, confronting her in a subtle way to almost say ‘how dare you’ assume she’s not still working on the case. What else was Rebecca supposed to believe since the police have not communicated with her? Doerksen just plays the character as she is written, so we can’t totally fault her performance but she needed to bring just a bit more warmth to the role.

That being said, Girl in the Cellar is a taut drama that turns a disturbing subject into 90-minutes of gripping entertainment, lead by an excellent cast, expertly directed, bringing the story on the page to vivid life on screen.

Girl in the Cellar has a run time of 1 hour 28 minutes, and is rated TV-14.

Official Trailer | Girl in the Cellar

Lifetime