Little Girl in the Window (CME Summer Productions, Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

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

After that Lifetime showed a quite good modern-day Gothic thriller called Little Girl in the Window, directed by Sean Cisterna (whose name I had noticed on the recent Lifetime film There’s a New Killer in Town, whose trick ending turned me off but which was a pretty good Lifetime thriller until then; he also directed Daddy’s Little Secret for them, another tale of women being held captive by a psycho and turned into sex slaves) from a script by Rolfe Kanefsky. The central characters in this one are actually two adults, Paul and Iris Wilson (Brendan Morgan and top-billed Mary Antonini), upwardly mobile African-Americans. Paul is a successful attorney who’s just been handed a big case that will enable him to make partner at his law firm if he wins, and Iris is a former professional photographer turned graphic designer. Unfortunately, after six years of marriage Iris is in a state of major clinical depression following the loss of their first child to a miscarriage. Paul tries to cheer her up by buying her a new camera and encouraging her to travel through the neighborhood and take pictures of anything she finds interesting. She spots a window in the attic of a multi-story house and takes a photo, only when she looks at it later she sees someone inside the house had traced the letters “HELP” in backwards writing on the window. Iris goes back there the next day to check out the house again and make sure she knows the location, and runs into the building’s quirky owner, Robert Carnell (Jean-Paul Najm). Iris says she saw an eight-year-old girl flash across the window momentarily, but Carnell says what she saw was just an antique doll, part of his late mother’s collection of such things.

It’s already been established that Iris is a buff of true-crime TV shows, including one called Undercover Crime that’s obviously a knockoff of America’s Most Wanted. Indeed, the opening of the film shows her watching the Undercover Crime report on 28-year-old Jennifer Lewis (Ann Pirvu), who disappeared eight years previously and has not been seen or heard from since. Iris reports Carnell to the police (by the way, there’s no indication as to where this film takes place; the license plates on the cars are carefully made up to eliminate any real state name and are just white characters on a plain blue background) but the officer who takes her report, Stefan Clark (Elias Edraki), couldn’t be less interested in it. He complains that he works such long hours his wife has accused him of being married to the police department instead of her (uncomfortably reminiscent of Iris’s own predicament: being married to a lawyer who spends much more time on his cases than with her), and he runs through the long list of standard cop-outs: maybe she ran away, maybe she’s just playing a joke, maybe … maybe … maybe. So Iris decides to stake out the Carnell house herself, taking advantage of Paul’s two-week out-of-town trip – only Carnell catches her and, after a brief struggle, overpowers her and drags her into his home. He drugs her with ether or some other anesthetic that’s administered with a soaked rag, and when she comes to she’s part of Carnell’s captive harem along with Jennifer Lewis; her eight-year-old daughter May (Ava Weiss), who was fathered by Carnell; and Carol (Tommie-Amber Pirie), the straw boss of the outfit, who lives in fear of Carnell but also identifies with him, Stockholm Syndrome-style, and disciplines his other victims if they threaten to rebel against his authority.

The jump in Kanefsky’s script from Iris the assured professional to Iris the would-be sex slave of a crazy psycho is a bit hard to take at times, but it offers the clash in world views between her and Carnell’s other victims, who seem resigned to their fate and grimly (or not so grimly) accepted it as a done deal. While most people who commit this particularly awful sort of crime in real life (or in other fictions about it) target people who literally “never would be missed” – they’re outright homeless, or they’re estranged from their parents, or they have no surviving relatives, or something. When Carnell realizes that Iris is in a committed relationship with a husband who genuinely loves her and cares for her, he forces Iris to leave a dear-John voicemail to Paul, saying that she’s leaving him and moving on with her life. Paul doesn’t hear this message until he actually arrives home following his two-week business trip, and when he does he notices a man’s voice on the tape prompting Iris: he says, “I’m moving on,” and then she repeats it. From this he deduces that she’s being held captive against her will and the voicemail is a hostage audio. One clever thing Iris does to convince Paul that the message was made under duress is use the name “Dana,” supposedly that of their dead child but actually a name they’ve never spoken to anyone but each other. The best parts of the script detail the four women captives’ lives under Carnell’s captivity and Iris’s determination to free herself and them while the others are either resigned to their fate or, in Carol’s case, actively colluding with Carnell as his disciplinarian. One thing that particularly irritates Carnell is when his food is overcooked – as a thoroughgoing male chauvinist, he insists that his captives cook for him but he’s also fond of making long speeches to them that distract them while they’re trying to do that and lead to them burning his food.

While all this is going on, Paul has finally convinced Detective Clark to give a damn about the case. Paul has also received an anonymous phone call from Carnell asking for a meeting, obviously so Carnell can get rid of this pesky relative and kill him before he blows the whistle on Carnell’s sordid operation. Also, like the bad guy in Emma O’Donoghue’s novel Room (still the best depiction of this bizarre sort of ongoing sex crime I can think of – both the book itself and Lenny Abrahamson’s great film of it), Carnell has not only fathered the child of one of his captives and raised her in captivity so she’s never seen the world outside his house, he’s also insisted on handling the actual births himself rather than involving outside medical personnel that would give his sick game away. He makes a veiled allusion to having killed previous captives who got out of line and also having arranged “miscarriages” (obviously D.I.Y. abortions) for some of the women, with the obvious result that he screwed up their insides so badly they could no longer have children. And he’s marked Iris as the next mother of one of his kids because, despite her recent miscarriage, she’s still intact in that department – though one place I was surprised Kanefsky did not go in his script was having Carnell successfully rape Iris and get her pregnant, thereby leaving her and Paul with the dilemma of whether to have an abortion or go ahead with the birth and raise Carnell’s baby as their own. Eventually Carnell forces Iris to write a handwritten letter to Paul reiterating that she’s breaking up with him of her own free will – and meanwhile Iris discovers a Polaroid camera and takes five photos documenting the conditions she and the other women are being held in.

This proves to be Carnell’s undoing as she pockets the pen he gave her to write the letter, uses it as a lockpick to open the door as Carnell has taken one of his rare trips out of town without locking the women’s chains first, and opening the door so she, Jennifer and May can get out. The windows are all barred, but Iris spots a loose section in one of the bars and is able to create an opening. It’s not big enough for Iris or Jennifer to go through, but being a child May can get through. Iris instructs May to go to the neighbor, a middle-aged Black woman named Mrs. Norris (Shakura S’Aida) who’s frequently seen walking her dog, and tell her to call the police. She loses the all-important documentation envelope with the Polaroids in it, but fortunately (and frankly unbelievably) Carnell misses it too and it ultimately ends up in the hands of the police, who free Iris and Jennifer and bust Carnell. My husband Charles didn’t think either of these Lifetime movies broke new ground or was especially good, but I liked Little Girl in the Window as a modern equivalent of a Gothic thriller that got the job done. Given a plot that made sense within the genre conventions and without the horrible trick ending of There’s a New Killer in Town, Sean Cisterna proved to be an unusually good director with an effective command of both suspense and terror.