Delayed Reaction: Lost Girls

Premise: After her escort daughter goes missing and evidence of a serial killer is found in the area she went missing, a mother works tirelessly to get the police and media to care about what happened to her daughter.

 

So, this is Zodiac Lite. Same basic story at half the runtime. However, like a Lite beer, no matter what the advertising says, something is missing out when you take that much out, even if it more or less gets you to the same place. Like Zodiac, Lost Girls is about a real serial killer investigation that is also unresolved still. That's really where the comparisons should stop though. The Zodiac killer was a phenomenon. Whoever that guy was, he was as savvy with the media as any serial killer - especially one who didn't get caught - has been. The Long Island Serial Killer covered in Lost Girls tried to remain hidden, only getting discovered by mistake. Zodiac focuses on the reporters and police investigating. Lost Girls looks at the family of the dead or missing women. Zodiac was an expensive movie, made by an established filmmaker with the clout to get his exact vision released by a major studio. Lost Girls is a small Sundance release from an established documentary filmmaker taking her first stab are narrative filmmaking...So, yeah. I'm going to stop talking about Zodiac now. Otherwise, this'll just be about me saying you should watch that movie instead.

 

Lost Girls has a nice cast for a Sundance-sized movie. Amy Ryan tries to get back some of her Oscar-nominated Gone Baby Gone mojo. Fresh off JoJo Rabbit, Thomasin McKenzie continues to impress as one of Ryan's other daughters. I liked LoLa Kirke, Dean Winters, and Gabriel Byrne in this too. It's Ryan's movie though. I doubt it's the Oscar play she probably hoped it would be, but it's a nice "driven mother" performance with a lot of regret in her past. The movie does a solid job pointing out how differently the media and police treat the case since the victims were "just" sex workers. They still have families that care about them and their safety as well, which gets lost in these narratives so often.

 

The movie does have a curiosity problem though. You can make a movie about the Black Dahlia or the Zodiac killer, because there's a lot of public curiosity about them. There's a fever to solving the case that's interesting to track. So, even if the conclusion doesn't end with finding identity of the killer, the journey seems worth it. Lost Girls though is about a serial killer that no one seems to care about; how the families have to struggle to get people to even raise an eyebrow. So, the focus of the movie is movie about why people don't care rather than about the investigation into who did it. When it ends without answers, the movie feels more empty than other unsolved cases. Or, to put it more simply:

• Zodiac Killer. Everyone cares. Still can't find the killer. That's interesting, because you'd think with that much attention, they could’ve figured it out.
• Long Island Serial Killer. No one cares. Can't find the killer. That's not interesting, because if no one cares, then it's not surprising that they never identified the killer.

This movie does what it can to raise the intrigue, but the facts of the case just don't make for an interesting enough movie, and, probably because the filmmaker has worked in documentaries for so long, the movie isn't willing to go out on more of a limb to add narrative intrigue.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend