The Girl Locked Upstairs: The Tanya Kach Story (Howard Braunstein Films, Marwar Junction Productions, Lifetime, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, June 9) I ended up watching two Lifetime movies with my husband Charles, both of which were about young women trapped in both physical and psychological bondage by unscrupulous men. As often happens when Lifetime pairs two movies with similar themes, the first one, The Girl Locked Upstairs: The Tanya Kach Story, was considerably better than the second, Gaslit by My Husband: The Morgan Metzer Story. Indeed, The Girl Locked Upstairs – ostensibly based on a true story, though with a lot of compression and fictionalization attached – was one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen on Lifetime. Tanya Kach (Jordyn Ashley Olson) was a 14-year-old student at Mulberry Middle School (really Cornell Intermediate School) in McKeesport, Pennsylvania whose life was a living hell even before she fell into the hands of her captor, security guard Tom Hose (Robert Baker, who strikingly resembles the young, still-hunky Orson Welles and would be good casting for a biopic of the young Welles). Her real-life mother Stephanie Darlet (Jordana Summer) had disowned her and turned her over to the foster-care system, where she kept getting placed by families who were just in it for the money and couldn’t have cared less about her. When she arrives at Mulberry Middle School she becomes an instant target for the “cool kids” to pick on. Tom Hose becomes her only friend after he catches her smoking with a boy, sends him to detention (he does his job with a martinet-like ferocity, handing out detentions and suspensions like they were candy at a kids’ party) but lets her off the hook. They do a lot of hanging out together in the grandstand of the school’s athletic field, and eventually both proximity and Tanya’s teenage hormones kick in and they kiss.

Tanya complains to Tom (by now they’re both on a first-names basis) that she has nowhere to go because her own mother wants nothing to do with her (and she confirms that when Tom gives her a sheet of instructions to get to mom’s current residence, a man answers the door and mom tells Tanya that she’s under a court order that forbids any contact between the two) and her foster parents don’t either. Tom offers to put her up at his place, and once she moves in with him he literally locks her in the attic, keeps the key in the door and demands that she not come out or open the door for anyone but him. Tanya’s story becomes what I’ve described in previous posts on Lifetime movies with this premise as the democratization of sadomasochism. In the old days these sorts of nasty sex games were the sole province of members of the upper classes because they were the only ones who could afford them – S/M is named after the Baron Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and the Marquis de Sade – but in the modern era people who have (and need) ordinary jobs have figured out new and creative ways of kidnapping and enslaving potential victims while maintaining the outward appearance of everyday lifestyles. The show was introduced by Elizabeth Smart, who’s turned her own two-year experience as a sicko’s sex slave into a career of sorts (she’s also listed as an “executive producer” of this film, though that’s an all-purpose credit that can mean just about anything), and she popped up in a pre-film introduction explaining how Tom “groommed” Tanya into following his commands without question. You can say that again: Tom’s “grooming” is at such a virtuoso level he practically plays her like an organ.

Director Simone Stock and writer Haley Harris both do excellent work dramatizing Tanya’s plight, including cleverly working around all those laws against depicting child sexual abuse by Stock keeping the cinematographer’s camera focused on her while suggesting what he’s doing to her through sound effects and her little grimaces. One interesting thing Stock and Harris did was have Tanya played by the same actress throughout her ordeal, even though she ages from 14 to 24 during the main part of the story (as well as a flash-forward 12 years after he’s finally caught and punished). There’s a brief mention early on of another Mulberry Middle School student who disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and this had me wondering if Tom would decide that Tanya had got too old for him to get his sick jollies out of her and he’d literally dump her for a younger victim. Instead Tom holds on to her for over a decade, though once she’s 18 (and therefore past the legal age of consent) he allows her a bit more freedom. One bizarre wrinkle of this story is that Tom is living with his elderly parents, from whom he must carefully conceal that he’s holding a young woman inside their house as a hostage. That means she can’t wear any shoes but has to go around with socks alone (so her footsteps won’t be audible to the parents), and also that she can’t go out and can’t even bathe regularly. Tanya can only bathe under Tom’s supervision when his parents are out of the house – which is actually fairly regularly at first, given that they’re regular churchgoers and attend services at least twice a week. But once Tom’s dad comes down with a major life-threatening chronic illness, Tom cuts way back on Tanya’s paroles.

At one point Tanya complains that she literally hasn’t got anything new to wear, and Tom agrees to let her go clothes-shopping at a local thrift store run by a Black woman whose husband owns a grocery store nearby. (They really existed; their names were Joe and Janet Sparico, though imdb.com doesn’t list the characters or the actors playing them and I don’t know whether the real-life prototypes were Black.) There’s also a church nearby, and Tanya starts sneaking in there even though by doing so she risks incurring Tom’s wrath every time she comes home later than he’s expecting her. Ultimately Tom proposes marriage to Tanya – and she accepts, having no other realistic options – before the cops, alerted by the Sparicos, break into the house one afternoon and arrest Tom on the spot. Director Stock stages the scene powerfully and dramatically, particularly in conveying the shock of Tom’s parents in the moment of learning that their son is a horrible sex criminal and he’s been holding a young woman hostage and subjecting her to repeated sexual abuse almost literally under their noses the whole time for 10 years. Charles questioned the use of Jordyn Ashley Olson to play Tanya from age 14 to 24 (plus the tag scene depicting her at 36), but to my mind she did an excellent job, expertly playing a woman whose development has been arrested (throughout the movie she sleeps with a teddy bear, indicating how she’s been prevented from reaching any sort of maturity) and making us feel for her plight without “milking it” or tugging too visibly and blatantly at the heartstrings. There are also effective bits, like Tom’s attempt to pass off Tanya as his girlfriend and potential caregiver for his dad – mom sees through it right away when Tanya is baffled by the very sight of a dishwasher.

The Girl Locked Upstairs is Lifetime at or close to its best: vividly directed, written and acted, especially by Robert Baker, who perfectly portrays the banality of his character’s evil (or, as I prefer to say, the evil of his banality). I should have liked more screen time showing how Tanya Kach regained her sanity and did the growing-up process Tom Hose deprived her of – that would have made an already first-rate movie better – but even with that covered only by a 12-year flash-forward The Girl Locked Upstairs is an excellent thriller that plays fair with the audience and manages to avoid the soapiness the story could have lent itself to in weaker hands.