Abduction Runs in the Family (MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

The second Lifetime movie I watched was also an unusually good one: Abduction Runs in the Family. It begins with a prologue in which a young girl named Alyssa Manning (Ellie Grace Pomeroy) is kidnapped from a public park by Miles Simon (Janes Hyde). Miles tells Alyssa that froom now on she is to be called “Sophie” and is to live with him. She remains with Miles for seven years until she’s finally rescued and returned to her real parents. Alyssa grows up to be a therapist (the adult Alyssa is played by Jessica Morris) and the host of a popular podcast on overcoming mental traumas. She’s also written a book about her kidnapping, how she remained sane throughout the seven years with Miles, and the culture shock she went through after she was brought back home to live with her parents again. Carolyn, her book editor, dies under mysterious circumstances just weeks before the book is supposed to be published, and in order to finish the editing task Alyssa’s publisher assigns a new editor, Sara (Sarah Navatrii).

Things come to a head when after serving 25 years Miles Simon is released from prison, and Alyssa suddenly has to adjust to the knowledge that tme person who kidnapped her will be free again and might target Alyssa’s young daughter Emma (Charlotte Hare), who’s now at the age her mom was at when she was “taken.” In addition to her own understandable anxieties about the safety of her daughter, Alyssa finds herself inundated with hordes of reporters and photographers begging her for comments about the imminent release of Miles Simon. She also has to deal with an ex-husband, Emma’s father Tony (Jason Cook), who couldn’t be less interested in the care of someone who is, after all, his daughter too; and a current boyfriend, Grant Bradshaw (Jason-Shane Scott, a hot young stud muffin with great pecs who’s been in quite a few Lifetime movies before, usually as villains but sometimes, as here, as a good guy), who’s understandably frustrated because Alyssa is so busy being a single parent to Emma they have neither the time nor the opportunity to have sex. At one point Alyssa bolts a crucial meeting about her book when she texts Grant asking him to pick Emma up from school, then she panics when she doesn’t hear back from either of them. It turns out Emma just wanted to get milkshakes and Grant had his phone turned off during their outing, but Alyssa freaks out anyway.

Later the inevitable (at least for a Lifetime movie, especially one with a provocative title like Abduction Runs in the Family) happens and Emma is indeed kidnapped from the same park Alyssa was taken from almost 30 years earlier. Miles Simon offers to help Alyssa on the ground that as an ex-kidnapper he’s likely to have insights into how Emma’s abductor would think, and after some understandable reluctance Alyssa takes him up on his offer. Eventually they receive a video of Emma, and Alyssa recognizes the blanket – a blue one with white images of clouds – as similar to the one Miles got for Alyssa when he kidnapped her. Alyssa asks Miles for a photo of his long-lost daughter Sophie – the one Miles was seeking to replace with Alyssa when he took her – and notices a pendant around her neck that she’s seen before. It turns out that Miles gave that pendant to Sophie – and where Alyssa has seen it is around the neck of her editor Sara, who [spoiler alert!] is actually Miles’ biological daughter Sophie. After the courts had declared Miles an unfit parent because he was working three jobs and left her alone a lot of the time, Sophie a.k.a. Sara went into foster-care hell, placed with one set of abusive parents after another, and over the years she became determined to take revenge on Alyssa, who got the father’s love Sophie felt she deserved from the man who, after all, was her biological dad.

Sophie’s plan of revenge included getting the job as Alyssa’s book editor by murdering her previous one, and when she confronts Alyssa and MIles at the end, Alyssa tries to calm her down with therapy-speak and Sophie says, “Don’t give me any of that crap about forgiveness you say on your podcast.” In case you were wondering where the actual police were in the middle of this, it so happens that Alyssa’s best friend is Grace (Tryphena Wade), a Black woman officer with a severely butch haircut. Only Alyssa briefly alienates Grace for a couple of acts by wondering aloud whether she kidnapped Emma, since she’s wanted a child but couldn’t have one of her own (and she comes off as so dykey one doesn’t wonder why she can’t have a kid!), and even after Alyssa backs off of suspecting Grace is Emma’s kidnapper (and let’s face it, Grace would hardly be able to pass off Alyssa’s white daughter as her own!), both Grace and the male detective assigned to Emma’s case do little more than tell Alyssa to be patient and stay out of the way of their investigation. Ultimately Alyssa traces Sophie to the old cabin where both Sophie and Alyssa spent a good chunk of their childhoods, and Grant goes on ahead but gets shot by Sophie fhr his pains.

Then Alyssa and Miles crash the place, and in the end Sophie is pushed out of a second-floor window to her death below. Directed by Jeff Hare from a script by Jason-Shane Scott (so he has a brain as well as fabulous pecs!), Abduction Runs in the Family is actually a quite good suspense thriller with a welcome degree of moral ambiguity and complexity about the characters – especially Alyssa, who despite moments of almost parental affection for Miles never stopped wanting to be home, and who turned her childhood experience into helping others but still suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and other dysfunctions she discusses with her own therapist; and Miles, who did a despicable thing but did it for sympathetic, or at least understandable, reasons,and who emerges as one of the best and most interesting characters in the piece. We feel for Miles’ pain even though he did something despicable to alleviate it, and even Sophie comes off as a truly complex character and not just the stock-figure villainess she’d have become in the hands of a lesser writer.