Lost Girls (2020)

From the jump, this movie was very captivating. There was suspense and tension within even the first 10 minutes of the film. This is murder mystery based off of a true story revolving around Shannan Gilbert and the Long Island serial killings. The serial killer was never found although there are strong suspects as to who it might’ve been. The killer was hunting sex workers off of Craigslist, strangling them, and dumping the bodies by the beach. Shannan’s body wasn’t found with the other sex workers who had gone missing in Oak Beach. The film follows Mari Gilbert, a low income mother of two other daughters as they try to figure out what happened to Shannan. 

I immediately loved Mari for raising hell after the police wouldn’t listen to her. She fought until she figured out where her daughter was and what happened to her. I think one of the most successful things about the film is that you can really feel the family’s tension throughout the film. You really feel bad for Mari and feel her stress and fear as the journey progresses. In one of the scenes Mari is reviewing Shannan’s call to the police where she was clearly screaming for help and running. The police took an hour to get to the area when she had already disappeared, and dismissed her because the residents claimed she was on drugs.

There were several other scenes where the police would dismiss Mari and even stop looking for Shannan. At parts of the film like these you really get frustrated with the characters. It’s full of tension throughout the film.

Shannan was a sex worker who didn’t have the best relationship with her mother, because of her rough upbringing and mental health issues. One night though, when her mother told her to come over for dinner she failed to come. Because of the relationship she had with her family this wasn’t so uncommon. A couple things that were off though were 1) her mother received a call the next day from Shannan’s “doctor” who told her mother that he helped her, and has a “home for wayward girls.” This immediately was a red flag for me as a viewer, but the mom brushed it off because Shannan gets into trouble constantly and is friends with shady people. 2) Shannan’s boyfriend called her younger sister and he never calls her.

When the police wouldn’t help Mari as much as she wanted them to, she took matters into her own hands. She snuck around a potential killer’s property, and got in the car with a “conspiracy theorist” who wanted to give her more information on the murders. Mari did everything she could to figure out what happened to her daughter. It’s so frustrating to see how one woman finds several clues and information on the murder while the police don’t bother trying nearly as hard. Mainly because the girls were “prostitutes” one cop even asked why they were spending so much time on a hooker?