Butler's Cinema Scene

Amy Ryan

“LOST GIRLS” My rating: B (Now on Netflix)

95 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Anger radiates from “Lost Girls” like steam from a boiling pot.  It swirls around us; we inhale it; we burn with it.

Liz Garbus’ film is about the decade-old (and still unsolved) case of the Long Island serial killer, believed responsible for the deaths of at least 10 young women.

But it’s not a police procedural. More like a study of official indifference and incompetence.

The victims, you see, were call girls. No big loss, right?

The point of view taken by the filmmakers (Michael Were adapted Robert Kolker’s non-fiction book) is not that of a dedicated cop finding answers but of a grieving mother, wracked with uncertainty and played with extraordinary fierceness by Amy Ryan.

Mari Gilbert (Ryan) lives in a small town in upstate New York.  She’s a single mother (no mention of any man in her life, past or present) making ends meet with blue-collar gigs (waitressing, driving heavy construction equipment) and struggling with domestic issues.

One daughter, Sherre (Thomasin McKenzie of “Jojo Rabbit” and “Leave No Trace”), has a bad case of late-teen resentfulness. The second, tweener Sarra (Oona Laurence), is bi-polar, jerked between phases of defiance and crushing melancholy.

There’s another daughter whom we never really get to meet. Shannan, we learn, hasn’t lived with her mother since  puberty; she was raised by the state in foster homes. Now she resides in New Jersey, returning home on rare occasions but regularly contributing money to support her mother and siblings.

Shannan is a prostitute who uses Craig’s List to troll for customers. Mari undoubtedly knows this; she just won’t say it out loud.

Oona Lawrence, Amy Ryan, Thomasin McKenzie

When Shannan fails to appear for a planned family reunion and stops answering her phone, Mari gets worried. She tracks down Shannan’s boyfriend, then the driver (James Liao) who took Shannon to a john’s home in a gated community on Long Island. He reports she fled the house screaming and refused to get into his car, instead running off into the scrub brush.

The local detective (Dean Winters) who takes the  report thinks it’s a garbage case and resents Mari’s looming presence.  But the more she learns about the night Shannan went missing, the more angry she becomes.

It seems that local residents called the cops upon hearing Shannon’s wailing, but it took the officers an hour to respond, by which time the girl had vanished. Now Mari is stapling homemade missing person posters on every available surface, calling press conferences with the local media and becoming a nagging thorn in the side of local police bigwig Richard Dormer (Gabriel Byrne).

When — virtually by accident — the authorities stumble across a serial killer’s burial ground, Mari becomes convinced that Shannan must be one of his victims.

She ups her activism. She becomes part of a support/protest group of women whose daughters and sisters are among the dead. Lola Kirke (“Mozart in the Jungle”) is terrific as a  young woman who, like her murdered sister, is a prostitute and seemingly incapable of changing her life.

With the help of a local conspiracy theorist (Kevin Corrigan) Mari starts snooping around the home of a physician (Reed  Birney) whose attitude is, to say the least, questionable. But clear-cut answers are elusive.

Through it all Ryan scorches the screen with Mari’s indignation and fury. This is a magnificently emotional performance, yet also a remarkably nuanced one about an unlikely individual rising to the painful occasion in which she finds herself.

Director Garbus, a documentary maker here venturing into docudrama, displays no directorial flourishes. She doesn’t have to…Mari Gilbert’s story is plenty compelling without frills.  And as a chilling and dismaying postscript informs us, Mari’s life was more tragic than even “Lost Girls” can grasp.

| Robert W. Butler