The Boy Who Vanished, a.k.a. The Forgotten Son (Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, June 15) my husband Charles and I watched two unusually good (at least by their standards) Lifetime movies with been-there-seen-it-all titles: The Boy Who Vanished (shot under the working title The Forgotten Son) and Girl in the Attic. The Boy Who Vanished starts with a scene in which a young man calls 911 to report himself missing from his family. The young man is, or at least purports to be, Jackson “Jack” Reese (played by a very attractive actor named Aiden Howard), and he’s a teenager who ostensibly disappeared from home 12 years earlier. His parents are Haley Conner Reese (Tegan Moss) and her husband, Richard Reese (Matthew Kevin Anderson). The police keep him in custody for a few hours before finally releasing him to his (purported) parents. This includes giving him a DNA test (though we’re never told the results), and later on he takes an aptitude test at Montgomery, the local high school (the story is set in Seattle, presumably so the town of Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada could “play” it), that reveals that, far from being academically behind where he should be given his age, he’s actually far advanced intellectually. He explains this by telling his parents that during the 12 years he was away, he was held inside a cult – not a religious or sexual one but a financially predatory one which survived by pulling scams on well-to-do people – and they made him read serious books and watch high-end movies on VHS tapes. Our first inkling that Jack isn’t what he says he is is a phone call he receives from Travis (Gord Pankhurst), a rather seedy-looking individual with 1960’s-style hippie-length hair who drives around in a light grey van and appears to be stalking the Reeses: Richard, Haley, Jack and Jack’s younger brother Tyler (Kingston Goodjohn), who’s understandably jealous of the new-found attention long-lost Jack is getting from his parents and is feeling neglected by comparison.

Jack assures whoever is calling (we don’t yet know it’s Travis but we soon learn that) that he’s still on board with the plan, but having both Travis and another accomplice, a red-haired woman named Luna (Maia Michaels) who accosts Richard while he’s getting into his car, spits on his car window and chews him out for thinking he’s better than she is just because he’s rich, stalk the Reeses is not helping with whatever the plan is. Travis and his partner, it turns out, are after the estimated $100 million Richard Reese is holding on behalf of his wealth-management clients; they sent Jack into the Reeses’ home to hack into his computer and use it to transfer all $100 million into their and their cult’s account. Only Luna jumps the gun by literally bumping into Richard at a second meeting and stealing his wallet, then using the information on his credit cards to order thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise and run up such big bills all the cards get canceled. So when all four Reeses (Richard, Haley, Jack, and Tyler) go out to a fancy restaurant, they’re unable to pay the bill until Haley realizes she has enough cash on her to cover it. (Why Richard didn’t notice his wallet missing until their dinner date is something of a mystery.) The only person in the Reeses’ circle who’s at all suspicious of Jack and his true motives is Haley’s brother, Michael Conner (Jesse Moss), who was initially the prime suspect in Jack’s disappearance 12 years earlier. Michael was suspected then because a few bits of Jack’s clothing were found in the trailer in which he lived, and because he was a heavy drug user – though the shock of being suspected of such a heinous crime led him to quit drugs.

With the plot starting to unravel and the Seattle police getting closer to them, Travis and Luna kidnap Michael and forge an e-mail in his name confessing to having killed Jack 12 years earlier after spiking his soda with drugs so he’ll O.D. and die. Haley goes to Michael’s trailer home to see him and finds him incapacitated, calls 911 and Michael is taken to a hospital, where the doctors literally bring him back from death’s door. Jack, as part of Travis’s and Luna’s plot, sneaks into Richard’s home office and gets ready to transfer the $100,000,000 – only when he’s there he finds his own birth certificate, which finally reveals the secret of his true parentage. The birth certificate lists “Haley Conner” as his mother but leaves the father’s name blank. It turns out the father was Travis’s brother Wyatt, whom we never see because either during her pregnancy or just after Jack was born, Haley and Wyatt got into an argument, Wyatt pulled a gun on her, they both reached for the gun (score another one for Chicago’s original author, Maurine Dallas Watkins!), and she accidentally shot him, then met Richard and agreed that she would marry him and they would raise Jack as if he were both of theirs. Only Travis has been convinced all these years that Haley deliberately murdered his brother, and this has all been an elaborate revenge plot not only to kill her but to destroy her reputation and her and her husband’s finances.

Ultimately Jack sets up the $100,000,000 transfer but at the last minute can’t go through with it, and there’s a predictable final confrontation in which Travis is about to kill both Haley and Jack when Richard sneaks up behind him and clobbers him with a convenient baseball bat. We’re not sure if Travis is arrested or killed, but Jack is reunited with Haley and Richard and seems to be on his way to a happy, well-adjusted life with his family and his high-school girlfriend Summer (Grace Beedie). Though there were a few points on which writer Ken Miyamoto could have been more clear-headed about plot details, for the most part The Boy Who Vanished is quite compelling suspense filmmaking, well directed by Christie Will Wolf. But in 2015 Lifetime did an even better movie, Lost Boy (reviewed at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2015/07/lost-boy-legrand-productions-lifetime.html), on the same theme, in which the supposedly long-lost son was deliberately faking it but the makers of that movie, writer Jennifer Maisel and director Tara Miele, kept his motives powerfully elusive.