Girl in the Attic (Studio TF1 America, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I wasn’t expecting much from the second movie on Lifetime’s schedule, Saturday, June 14’s “premiere,” Girl in the Attic, especially since there wasn’t an imdb.com page for it until Monday morning, June 16. But it too turned out to be surprisingly effective even though it hewed close to Lifetime’s standard formulae. The central character is Kelsey Romano (Sophia Carriere), a 16-year-old woman who’s responded to her mother’s recent death from breast cancer by determining to run a half-marathon race in her home town, Portland, Oregon. (Once again, as in The Boy Who Vanished, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada “played” a U.S. city in the Pacific Northwest.) She’s raising money by shooting a video blog and posting it on local social media, and so far she’s collected $5,000 in pledges, halfway to her $10,000 goal. Unfortunately, she’s decided to keep this a secret from her father (John Cassini), portrayed as a typical Italian-American working-class guy. Even more unfortunately, she’s attracted the twisted attentions of Billy (Keenan Tracey), who ironically combines both my husband Charles’s job and my former one. He’s a clerk at a big-box grocery store and he’s also a caregiver for his disabled mother Debbie (Jean Louisa Kelly), who was formerly a singer and dancer until an auto accident and impending arthritis combined to take away her mobility and leave her in a wheelchair. Billy kidnaps Kelsey by ambushing her while she’s on one of her practice runs. He lures her by pretending to be searching for a missing dog – and both Charles and I were taken aback by this plot line because, while “searching for a missing dog” is a classic line used by pedophiles to lure children they want to molest, we had a hard time imagining it working on someone as old and relatively worldly as Kelsey.

Billy sneaks Kelsey into the proverbial attic while Debbie is out with her neighbor Mrs. Byrd (Beth Fotheringham), who appears to be her only friend. When Kelsey comes to, she realizes she’s literally bound to an old mattress in the attic, and Billy is insisting that she’s going to be his “wife” as soon as she proves herself “worthy” of that rather dubious honor by obeying him implicitly. At one point Billy takes Kelsey downstairs to bathe her in Debbie’s bathtub, and Debbie finds women’s hair in the drain and deduces from that that Billy has been sneaking a woman in there. At first she assumes this is just a normal, mutually consensual relationship, and she even demands to meet her son’s new girlfriend. She sets up a dinner party for them that Sunday, but Billy claims that his girlfriend is “ill” and can’t come. Billy fakes a video showing Kelsey looking suitably sick, but Debbie catches on when she recognizes her old hope chest, containing relics of her entertainment career, in the background of the shot and realizes it was taken in her attic. When Debbie finally meets Kelsey, they realize that they’re both being held prisoner by an increasingly demented and power-mad Billy, and the two form a wary bond as they plot a means of escape. Debbie’s first idea is to have Kelsey, who now that Debbie is aware of her existence Billy has changed her status to that of live-in maid and forces her to do housework, spike his beer with old sleeping tablets left over from Debbie’s late husband’s stash. Only that plan is unwittingly foiled by Mrs. Byrd, who comes over and presents Billy with a wooden box containing high-end whiskey. Billy decides that he’d rather drink the whiskey than beer, and when he pours out the beer in the kitchen sink he sees the drug residue it leaves behind and realizes he’s been had.

Debbie’s next attempt to break herself and Kelsey from Billy’s control involves crawling up the steps to the attic (and Jean Louisa Kelly’s acting in this scene is so convincing I looked her up on Wikipedia just to see if she’s disabled in real life, which she isn’t), but unfortunately her cell phone slips out of her pocket and Billy grabs it before she can use it to call the police. Kelsey and Debbie finally make their escape when Debbie uses nail polish remover to set her house on fire – a major sacrifice on her part because her house was the one constant in her life and she’d moved heaven and earth to hold on to it – confident that Mrs. Byrd’s hearing aid will respond to the fire alarm and she’ll notice the house is burning and will call 911. Eventually the police arrive, arrest Billy, and in the final scene Kelsey is reunited with her dad after a year and a half in captivity and she’s once again running, literally, as if her life depended on it. There’s an intriguing plot twist that’s mentioned in the online summaries of this film but is only slightly alluded to in the movie itself: supposedly Billy is trying to monetize Kelsey’s captivity by forcing her to shoot sexually explicit videos and posting them online to pay-to-view sites. Girl in the Attic is a film shrouded in mystery: at least three people were listed in various online sources as its director – David Weaver, Kaila York, and Michael Mortimer (Weaver is the one named in the actual credits) – and the writing was done by a committee: Tawnya Bhattacharya, Jill Abbinanti-Burke, and Ali Laventhol.

The producing company is listed as “Studio TF1 America” (the imdb.com page for The Boy Who Vanished also lists “Studio TF1 America” as its producers, but the actual credits list Champlain Media and Reel One Entertainment), and at least one major crew member, cinematographer Diego Lozano, worked on both. But I quite liked it, mainly because of the moral ambiguity of the characters. Billy is depicted not as a stock-figure villain, but as a basically nice if weak and unassuming figure who’s lousy at normal social interactions and “grows a pair” in the worst way possible: by exerting absolute authority over two helpless women. Kelsey has a spunk about her that keeps her from being the usual Lifetime victim, and Debbie is in some ways the most interesting character in the movie. She’s shown perched on the thin edge between being wheelchair-bound, able to use a walker (which she calls “Bridget”), and being totally mobile. One of the cruelest scenes is when Billy deliberately flushes a whole bottle of her anti-arthritis medication down the toilet – only Kelsey rescues her by finding another bottle of the drug under a bed in a room she’s been ordered to clean. I don’t recall having heard of Jean Louisa Kelly before, but she’s actually had a pretty compelling career: she got her start as a child actress, playing the late John Candy’s obnoxious niece in Uncle Buck (1989) and having an important singing role in the film Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995). Kelly is also a quite competent singer who’s released at least two full-length albums, Color of Your Heart (2013) and a standards album called For My Folks (2017), as well as a five-song EP, Willing. She’s 53 years old, a tough age for women at any stage in entertainment history, but more power to her if she’s got as great and tough-minded a performance in her as the one she gives here!