Left for Dead: The Ashley Reeves Story (Cineflix Pictures, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

There was one movie I wanted to watch last night: a Lifetime production of what turned out to be a quite compelling and beautifully made presentation called Left for Dead: The Ashley Reeves Story, Ashley Reeves (Anwen O’Driscoll) was a 17-year-old high school student in Belleville, Illinois in April 2006, when she was brought home by her former middle-school gym teacher, Sam Shelton (Benjamin Sutherland), who showed her the large house he shared with his mother (though she was out of town a lot and therefore he spent most of his time there alone), took her to his bedroom, seduced her and then offered to drive her home. Instead he took her to a deserted spot in the woods, strangled her with a choke hold and then left her there to die. She was found 30 hours later but in that time she had lapsed into a vegetative state and lost the ability to walk, talk or feed herself. The movie, beautifully directed by Gloria Ui Young Kim (yet another woman director Lifetime has given an opportunity to, along with such other promising talents as Vanissa Parise and Christine Conradt, whose work here shows she deserves a crack at a feature film) from a script by Christina Walsh, alternates between the long, difficult process of Ashley’s rehabilitation and flashbacks indicating what happened to bring her to that state. Ashley seems at the start of her story to have pretty much everything, including loving, supportive parents (James Gallanders and Jennie Garth), a network of friends, and a hot-looking boyfriend named Danny (Adrian Spencer – for once in a Lifetime movie the good guy is hotter than the bad guy!) who’s given her a “promise ring” and is hurt, but still supportive, when he learns she had sex with someone else.

Eventually the two plot strands come together as Ashley slowly undergoes the frustrating recovery, from being unable to speak at all to being able to answer yes-or-no questions with one eye blink for “yes” and two for “no,” then being able to talk in a halting voice and finally making the tough, painful adjustments to being able to walk again and also eat on her own. There’s one heartbreaking scene in which her mom feeds her a bowl of oatmeal and Ashley literally can’t master the skill of putting the spoon in the bowl, putting food into it, and lifting it to her mouth; ultimately mom has to do that for her. There’s also another odd but quite believable sequence in which mom chews out Ashley for letting Shelton seduce her – and one wants to walk into the screen, take her aside and say, “This isn’t helping! She needs support, not lectures!” Indeed, one of the running themes through the film is the feminist one that when young teenage males misbehave sexually society has an attitude of “boys will be boys,” while if a teenage girl does it she’s ostracized and blamed for her own predicament. Ashley gets hit again and again with the verbal comments of fellow students and townspeople to the effect that she brought it on herself by dating an older guy. Meanwhile, Sam is a real piece of work; not only did he go out on the town dancing the night after he’d abandoned Ashley and left her for dead (a detail that gets mentioned in virtually every account of the case and seems especially callous and cruel), but to our absolute non-surprise Ashley isn’t the only underage girl he’s got the hots for: the night he’s released on bail but placed under house arrest and forced to wear an ankle monitor, he calls up another teenage girl named Jenna (we never see her but we get the idea), assures her that she’s the one he really loves, and asks her to come over.

The climax occurs when Sam Shelton is getting ready for trial, only Ashley has recovered so much of her cognitive function Shelton’s lawyer argues that she’ll be such an effective witness she’ll demolish him in a courtroom and he’ll surely be convicted. So the attorney advises Shelton to plead out – surprisingly the deal does not require him to “allocute,” i.e, to say in open court that he actually did the crime he’s pleading guilty to and say j ust what it was he did. Ashley is royally disappointed that there isn’t going to be a trial and therefore she’s not going to be able to confront him in court and say what he did to her, but she gets to do that anyway at his sentencing hearing and we read that as her final victory, her overcoming both the physical damage and the mental trauma of what Sam Shelton did to her. There’s also a marvelous bit of hypocrisy in the person of the principal of the school where Sam taught, who pleads with the Reeveses not to pursue Sam through the legal system because he’s basically a decent man who’d never done anything like this before and it would be really, really unfair to ruin both Sam’s (and his well-to-do family’s) reputation and the school’s over this picayune little incident.

Left for Dead: The Ashley Reeves Story is pitch-perfect in every way: the script takes what was admittedly a virtually sure-fire story and dramatizes it vividly and well; the direction is quiet and ungimmicky but propels us into the story and makes us feel for the characters; Anwen O’Driscoll turns in a tour de force performance as Ashley (and by the way, kudos to her parents for giving her the normal spelling of the name instead of calling her something as pretentious and disgusting as “Ashlee” or, even worse, “Ashli”!), and the other actors are equally fine. Benjamin Sutherland hits the right mix of boyish charm (the real Sam Shelton was 26 when he assaulted the 17-year-old Ashley) and underlying psychopathology, especially when he whines (and for some reason actually expects people to believe) that Ashley’s near-death at his hands was an “accident.” His imdb.com page doesn’t say whether he’s any relation to Donald or Kiefer Sutherland, though like them he’s Canadian (from British Columbia). Also noteworthy is Adrian Spencer as Danny; he’s a hunk and I’d love to see more of him, especially in parts with more depth than the basically supportive and perplexed boyfriend he’s playing here. Left for Dead: The Ashley Reeves Story is the sort of diamond-in-the-rough movie we regular Lifetime watchers hope the network will give us, good enough to redeem all the hours we’ve spent watching the trash (entertaining trash, but still trash) this network usually gives its fans of all genders. (Lifetime used to advertise itself as “television for women,” but as I’ve pointed out before they frequently drop words like “cheerleader” and “sorority” in their movie titles to promise views of hot, nubile young female flesh in scanty clothing so straight men will watch this channel.)