Lost Girls (2020)

March 13, 2020 8:01 PM

When Mari Gilbert's daughter disappears, police inaction drives her own investigation into the gated Long Island community where Shannan was last seen. Her search brings attention to over a dozen murdered sex workers. (Netflix Original, based on the non-fiction book "Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery" by Robert Kolker)

Vulture review - Lost Girls Is an Anti-Police Procedural: "[Director] Garbus brings off something extraordinary in a film that sets out to leave us sad, enraged, and profoundly unsatisfied. Lost Girls makes us want to rethink our need for a certain kind of closure in a world that has so little of it. It makes other true-crime movies — and true-crime docs, several of which have been made about this case — seem not just sensationalistic but misleading in ways meant to hide the ugly truth: that the institutions meant to protect the least powerful in our society are dysfunctional bordering on diseased. The anti-procedural may be our greatest hope for change."

Daily Dead Review: LOST GIRLS Is a True Story That Explores Why the Murders of Sex Workers Go Unsolved

Den of Geek - Documentarian Liz Garbus makes her dramatic debut with Lost Girls, a true crime story focusing on the families destroyed by The Long Island Serial Killer

Variety - ‘Lost Girls’ Director Liz Garbus on How the Long Island Serial Killer Case Helped Change the Conversation Around Sex Workers

posted by oh yeah! (2 comments total)

I feel like I should have known more about this story, what with living in the tri-state area when the news came out about the bodies being found, but I guess I'd only really heard the news soundbites. So the details of all the police investigation fuck-ups was infuriating (and, fuck-ups is too charitable a reading, definitely seems like there was an active cover-up rather than just lazy negligence). And the ending credit epilogues on Mari and her surviving daughters was an unexpected kick in the teeth.

And yet, there was something beautiful and cathartic about this movie. Like, there is no closure in the traditional sense -- no arrest, no conviction. But that hug between Mari and Kim got me all weepy. I don't know. It's a bleak story on the face of it, but it left me feeling pretty sad, but more angry than hopeless.
posted by oh yeah! at 8:34 PM on March 13, 2020

I'm a member of the Websleuths community. I follow a lot of cases. Most of them are going nowhere as far as the public can see. There are many cases where investigators work hard, follow the leads they get, but just can't get the break that will solve the case through no fault of their own. But some of the cases though are just totally discarded. As Mari asks Dormer in the movie, are the cops covering up or just plain incompetent? In a lot of cases, it's both. Cops mess up, cops pursue their pet theories, cops ignore evidence because they just aren't very good investigators. Cops protect their own turf. Then when the obvious makes it into the open, it's better to just clam up.

The movie did a good job of illustrating most all these things. Amy Ryan was very good and both women playing the daughters were great.

I just have to comment on one little thing that kept breaking the spell... The Gilbert family SUV... Mari is barely hanging on with one job at the diner and dwindling hours as a construction worker and she's driving that big thing around down Long Island and back? Uh, no. But that's just me!
posted by Fukiyama at 8:54 PM on March 14, 2020