Girl in the Cellar (PF Maple Productions, Studio TF1 America, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Saturday, August 23) Lifetime ran a “world premiere” TV-movie called Girl in the Cellar, which unlike their other “Girl in the … ” movies did not appear to be based on a true story. Directed by Robert Adetuyi from a script by Eva Gonzalez Szigriszt (alas, imdb.com has no biographical information about her and therefore I don’t have a clue as to where that tongue-twisting name comes from), it begins with a Black woman named Rebecca West (Kyla Pratt) looking down at her daughter Lory (Kelcey Mawema), whom she’s locked in the titular cellar for six months because on the evening of the high-school prom Lory sneaked out of Rebecca’s house to attend the 18th birthday party of her sort-of boyfriend Austin (a great hunk of man-meat named Kyle Clark). Rebecca is looking down at Lory from the entrance to the cellar and telling her that Lory has to die so Rebecca can survive. Then we flash back six months earlier, and though for the first act Rebecca simply looks like your garden-variety overprotective mother, she quickly turns into the Psycho Bitch from Hell. First she gets mad at Lory for not telling her she’s been kicked out of her assignment as captain of the school’s women’s track team, then she gets even angrier when she finds that Austin has asked Lory to be his date at the prom (for which Lory was on the organizing committee and mom was also involved as one of the chaperones), and she gets angrier still when Lory returns from Austin’s 18th birthday party even though she’s sober (naturally the party was full of red plastic cups, which in a Lifetime movie is usually a sign that underage drinking is going on) and still has her virginity. (Austin is white, but it’s nice that whatever objections Rebecca has to him, the fact that they’d be an interracial couple is not one of them.) Also Lory hopes that if she does well enough in her final school track meets she’ll get a full-ride scholarship to UCLA, but Rebecca is dead set against that because it’ll mean Lory leaving their home in Michigan and going to school halfway across the country.

So Rebecca forces Lory to take a ride with her to an old abandoned house on the outskirts of town. She tells Lory she just needs some help going through old things in the cellar, which was built by Rebecca’s parents as a fallout shelter in the early 1960’s (when fallout shelters were briefly a “thing”), but when they get there Rebecca literally locks her daughter in and tells her she’s going to keep her there at least until the prom is over. One of the things that sparked this was that Rebecca confiscated Lory’s phone and saw a text on it from Austin suggesting that the two run away to California together. Austin is an industrious kid who’s been working as a landscape gardener for two years, and Rebecca at first threatens to call the police on him when he starts turning up at the Wests’ home. Rebecca adds Munchhausen’s syndrome by proxy to her other mental illnesses when she goes to the media and becomes a crusader for herself and other parents of children who’ve gone missing. She cries a lot of crocodile tears on various TV interviews about how Lory was literally her dream child – for years she and her husband had tried to have a baby, only her husband died while Rebecca was still pregnant with Lory and she decided to raise Lory as a single parent and give her the advantages Rebecca herself had never had from her own abusive parents. Rebecca even went back to church to thank God for bringing her Lory (at different times in the film, both Kyla Pratt and Kelcey Mawema sing “This Little Light of Mine” in church services). The film expertly cuts between Rebecca’s public persona as the grieving mother and her private reality as her daughter’s tormentor. She’s mounted a red security camera on the wall of the cellar, through which she can not only spy on Lory at any time but speak to her in almost godlike tones.

At first Rebecca tells the attendees at the prom that Lory caught sick at the last minute and couldn’t go. Instead Rebecca shows up at the prom for her chaperone gig in the same red dress she bought for Lory to attend, and Austin sneaks up behind her and taps her on the shoulder thinking she’s Lory. (I’d been questioning the casting of two such similar-looking actresses as Kyla Pratt and Kelcey Mawema as mother and daughter – Pratt looked more like Mawema’s older sister than her mother – but the visual similarity between the two becomes an important plot point later on.) At one point Rebecca lowers a pen and paper to Lory and forces her to write a note reading that she ran away from home but is tired and wants to come back, and Lori does so in hopes that will get her mom to let her out. But no sooner does Rebecca have the note that she gets an invitation to speak at a mayor’s luncheon on the subject of missing children, and she crumples the note and throws it away because it’s no longer needed. While they’re working together on the search for Lory (of course, mom knows exactly where she is!) Rebecca and Austin form a modus vivendi. Austin shows up one morning to start mowing Rebecca’s lawn, and we get some nice look-sees of Kyle Clark’s shirtless (and, alas, hairless – you can’t have everything) body as he works. Eventually Rebecca invites him in for iced tea, and just when you’re thinking, “Oh, no, they’re not going to have Rebecca seduce Austin,” they have Rebecca seduce Austin. (It’s an interesting inversion of the central premise of Lolita: instead of the older partner romancing the mother to get close to the underage daughter he really has the hots for, it’s the younger man screwing his missing girlfriend’s mother to get closer to her.)

Unfortunately, the next morning Rebecca’s scheme starts to unravel when, getting ready to leave Rebecca’s home after their tryst, Austin spots Rebecca’s laptop and sees a scene of someone who looks like Lory being held prisoner in a cellar. He reports this to the police, only the woman detective on the case (Heather Doerksen) tells him they need more evidence and Austin needs to keep hanging around Rebecca’s place to get some. Meanwhile, Lory has hooked up a storage battery in the cellar to some lights so she can read, and she finds [spoiler alert!] an old diary Rebecca kept when she was being held prisoner in that same cellar by her own abusive parents. After finding no online presence for “Rebecca West” anywhere in the cloud, the detective finally realizes that Rebecca might have been using another name before her marriage to Lory’s father, and she finds a copy of the marriage certificate that gives Rebecca’s maiden name: Johnson. Then she traces news reports of a fire at the house where the cellar is located, which Rebecca had never bothered to have rebuilt even though she owned it after the deaths of her parents. The report explains that the fire was arson and Rebecca was the prime suspect; obviously she burned her parents alive to escape their maniacal control. While all this is happening, Rebecca has decided that she needs Lory to die, so she stops sending in the food packets (designed for astronauts) that are the only things she’s been giving Lory to eat, intending to starve her. The woman detective and a squad of police ultimately go to the old address and rescue Lory in the proverbial nick of time.

Girl in the Cellar is a rather odd movie, powerful and moving in some aspects and pretty silly in others. The biggest mystery about it is why Rebecca suddenly turns from mother to monster, from declaring her love for Lory to abusing her in this extravagant fashion; the revelation that her own parents similarly abused her offers a partial but not totally fulfilling explanation. (It also comes a bit too close for my comfort to what I call the vampire theory of child abuse: that abused kids become abusers themselves when they grow up and have children of their own.) Where the film really scores is in Kyla Pratt’s performance. She expertly captures the character in all her moods: the psychopathic monster she is underneath, the grieving-mother façade she puts on in public, even the seductress taking advantage of Austin’s combination of lovestruck boyfriend (that’s the real reason casting director Lindsay Chag had to pick two strikingly similar-looking actresses for the leads; they had to look close enough in age that Austin’s willingness to fuck Rebecca because he really wants to fuck Lory would be believable) and horny teenage straight boy. Girl in the Cellar isn’t a great movie even by Lifetime standards, but Kyle Pratt’s incredible acting skills make Rebecca a believable character even though through much of it she looks and acts so much like a wicked witch we could think she’s auditioning to play Elphaba in Wicked. It’s also the sort of movie that ends just when it’s beginning to get interesting: one would like to know how the rescued Lory would adjust after having lost six months of her life at her mother’s hands, and whether she and Austin got back together or whether the trauma of knowing Austin had sex with Lory’s ultra-abusive mom would destroy their subsequent chances at a relationship.