Girl in the Shed: The Kidnapping of Abby Hernandez (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 8 p.m. I put on the latest Lifetime movie, Girl in the Shed: The Kidnapping of Abby Hernandez, based on a true story (the real Abigail “Abby” Hernandez was abducted from her home town of North Conway, New Hampshire while walking home from high school on October 9, 2013 – by coincidence also the 73rd anniversary of the birth of John Lennon – and held captive for nearly a year) and the latest in a series of similarly titled Lifetime movies: Girl in the Box, The Girl in the Bathtub. Girl in the Bunker, Girl in the Basement and somewhat similar stories with different titles, Abducted: The Mary Stauffer Story and Cleveland Abduction. (I’ve seen all the above except for Girl in the Basement.) Once again, doing a film (however altered from the real events) based on a true story seemed to put Lifetime’s directors, writers and actors on their best behavior. Here, director Jessica Harman and writer Michael Vickerman (it’s odd that this script was written by a man and directed by a woman: usually it’s the other way around!) turn Girl in the Shed (actually a converted freight car from a train that still stank of the stuff it had handled previously) into a taut, exciting melodrama with some level of dramatic and emotional complexity.

That’s true even though those damnable laws against depicting sexual relationships between adults and children forbade Vickerman and Harman from dramatizing perhaps the most abusive thing Hernandez’ kidnapper, Nicholas “Nick” Kibby, did to her. Given that Abby Hernandez was just 14 when she was kidnapped – and the actress playing her, Lindsay Navarro, was 17 (still underage) – the writing and direction could do no more than hint at what was going on between them and what he was really doing to her. Thus we see them facing away from each other as they lay in the same bed, and occasionally she puts out her hand to him, but we don’t see anything more sexually explicit than that. Given that the real Nick Kibby was arrested and pled guilty to rape as well as kidnapping, the whitewashed portrayal of him in the movie – in which he seems decorous and almost charming – doesn’t match what we can guess were his real motives were. The movie doesn’t include a scene mentioned by the real Abigail Hernandez during a 15-minute “Behind the Headlines” in which she asked Nick exactly why he had kidnapped her, and he said it was because his girlfriend had just left him and he wanted to strike back by hurting a woman, any woman, he didn’t care whom. Also, Hernandez’ account of her own abduction is considerably saltier linguistically, with liberal doses of the “F”-word (bleeped, of course, this being American TV) as she recalls what he said to her as he took her and held her for nearly a year.

Despite the censorship issues that kept Lifetime and its producers, the Johnson Production Group, from being able to tell this story exactly as it happened, Girl in the Shed as it stands is excellent, with rich, powerful characterizations and actors that are able to take advantage of the complexities in Vickerman’s script. One fascinating thing about Girl in the Shed is that for much of it the focus is as much on Abby’s mother Zenya as it is on Abby herself; Zenya becomes an impassioned revenge figure in her own right as she mobilizes everyone from the FBI to the media to local store owners to help her search for Abby and counter all the suggestions she gets from well-meaning but misunderstanding officials who keep saying Abby was a runaway, that she must have got pregnant, or any number of less sinister possibilities than the real one: that she was abducted by a psycho who’s holding her hostage. As time passes and the media move on, and Zenya finds her case is being treated as yesterday’s news, she gets more and more exasperated and at one point even gets to say, “Bullshit!”, as yet another authority figure patronizes her and says Abby was quite likely a runaway. And we get to hear Erica Durance, as Zenya, say the B.S.-word on screen instead of having her euphemized. Durance is as authoritative in her role as Lindsay Navarro is in hers – and the third principal, Ben Savage as Nate Kibby, is also quite good. He manages to come off as pathetic in the good sense, making us understand What Makes Nate Run even while we also can’t stand him for taking captive and torturing that poor, defenseless teenage girl.

At one point he wears a bizarre mask that reminded me of The Phantom of the Opera because, he explains, he can’t let Abby see what he really looks like – though Abby finally gets a good look at him when they’re in bed together and Nick has let it slip off his face. He also tells her he can’t let her know his real name, so she decides to call him “Felix” because, she says, it sounds smart. (The only two Felixes I could think of are on opposite sides of the culture divide: composer Felix Mendelssohn and the 1920’s cartoon character Felix the Cat, of whom Paul Whiteman recorded a novelty song that featured Bix Beiderbecke soloing.) As the film is winding down Nick gets laid off from his job – we aren’t sure what he does for a living but it appears to be something proletarian – and he decides to enlist Abby’s help in using his computer and scanner to counterfeit $100 bills. The moment the plot went there, I figured, “Oh, a cop is going to bust someone for counterfeiting and they’re going to rat him out.” That indeed happens, though the hapless victim of Nick’s fake-money scam is a woman who screams at him over his phone and tells him she’s going to report him to the police. In Abby Hernandez’ post-film interview she said that this woman was a prostitute – maybe that’s why Nick thought he would be a safe person to pass a counterfeit bill to – but once again LIfetime and writer Vickerman decided to pull their punches on this. (One also wonders why Nick would need a $100 hooker when he was also regularly raping Abby.).

After a frantic scene in which Nick tries to wipe down every surface on his home and everywhere else, including that shed where Abby has spent most of her time in captivity, he forces her to get into his car, drives to a deserted road – and then just lets her go. Abby, who has already learned that Nick had lied to her about taking her out of state when in fact she was just miles away from North Conway, walks miles back to her mom’s place – she certainly learned her lesson about accepting rides from strangers! – and after first showing up looking so worn and bedraggled her mom isn’t sure who she is, the two eventually recognize each other and we get the expected happy ending. Abigail Hernandez is named as one of the producers on this film – which makes the inaccuracies in the script all the more galling (in one news report, https://www.the-sun.com/entertainment/4779927/who-abby-hernandez-girl-in-shed/, Nick Kibby is described as having created and passed counterfeit money throughout Abby’s captivity, not just towards the end after losing his job), but on its own terms Girl in the Shed is quite entertaining and moving despite the inaccuracies, and there are nice touches like making Nick a conspiracy buff believing everything from the flat-earth theory – at one point he wears a T-shirt with the logo of NASA, only instead of saying “NASA” it says “LIES” – to the one about 9/11 being an inside job, which leads to him getting reprimanded by his boss even though it’s financial pressures, not Nick spouting conspiracy propaganda on the job, that leads to him getting fired.