Lost Girls

Liz Garbus, the award-winning documentarian behind films like “What Happened, Miss Simone?,” makes her narrative directorial debut with the powerful “Lost Girls,” an emotional examination of one of the modern era's most famous unsolved cases. When non-fiction filmmakers turn to directing actors, there’s often something lost in the process, but Garbus proves a natural at the transition, drawing one of the best performances in the career of the great Amy Ryan. Having read the book and knowing a lot about the case, I was skeptical that this tragedy could be turned into an effective drama, but Garbus pulls it off, making smart decisions at every turn and finding a throughline in a story that technically doesn’t have an ending yet.

The way she does so is by focusing on Mari Gilbert (Amy Ryan), an Ellenville mother whose life becomes a waking nightmare when her daughter Shannan disappears. It was May of 2010 when Shannan Gilbert simply vanished. Calls from her sister (Thomasin McKenzie) went unanswered and panic really set in when the police revealed to Mari that Shannan had made a 911 call from Oak Beach the night before. Even though Shannan was panicked and sounded like she was running, the authorities didn’t show up for almost an hour. Shannan was gone. And that was just the beginning of what Garbus reveals in the very first frames is still an unsolved case.

What happened next turned the story of a missing young woman into something that has obsessed true crime fans for years. While searching for Shannan, a body was found in a burlap sack, but it wasn’t Shannan. And neither was the next body found off Ocean Parkway in a sack. Or the next. Four bodies were found early in the investigation, hinting at a serial killer in this wealthy part of the country who was killing sex workers and dumping them. By the time it was over, more than ten bodies would be discovered, including Shannan’s, although her case has often been considered separate from the others. It’s very possible that the disappearance and accidental death of Shannan Gilbert led to the discovery of a serial killer, or that she was a victim herself. We still don't know for sure. We may never know.

A lot of filmmakers would have approached this case like a procedural, focusing on the evidence, conflicting stories, conspiracy theories, and other case details. That’s not “Lost Girls.” If anything, Garbus and screenwriter Michael Werwie point fingers at the authorities—represented by characters played by Dean Winters and Gabriel Byrne—and accuse them not only of incompetence but lack of concern because the missing women were prostitutes. Most powerfully, Garbus works with Ryan to make Mari Gilbert a fully-realized character. They don’t overplay the fact that Mari knew what her daughter was doing, and possibly even liked the extra cash flow her child earned from a dangerous profession, or that Mari felt extra responsibility because she had once given up Shannan to foster care. She couldn’t give her up again. But these are just finely-tuned character details, not the melodramatic stress points they would have been in a lesser film.