The Girl Who Survived: The Alina Thompson Story (Studio TF1 America, FYI, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Yesterday (Sunday, September 21) I watched two Lifetime movies in quick succession: the previous night’s “premiere,” The Girl Who Survived: The Alina Thompson Story; and last night’s “premiere,” No One Believed Me. The Girl Who Survived: The Alina Thompson Story was a movie I had high hopes for because it was based on a true story – model photographer William Bradford (Steve Byers) hangs out at group photo shoots, attracts young women to pose for him as a way of gaining exposure as potential models, and then kills them – and because Christine Conradt wrote the script. I’ve long been a particular fan of Conradt’s because usually she gives her characters, especially her villains, genuine complexity and multidimensionality. Not this time, alas. While other Lifetime writers who take on fact-based stories are disciplined by the real details of the case to avoid melodramatic excesses, Conradt seemed limited by the actual case and unable to provide any convincing explanation (or any explanation at all, really) for What Made William Run. One would have thought, based not only on Lifetime’s conventions but the way real-world crimes like Bradford’s usually go down, that Bradford would have raped or sexually assaulted his victims before he killed them. No such luck: in the opening we see him pick up a nice young woman at a bar (the bar is simply called “Bar,” which couldn’t help but remind me of the similarly anonymous “Bar” in the 1960 film The Leech Woman, which the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew ridiculed by saying, “Hey, let’s go to Bar, order Sandwich, and have Drink!”), take her outside, take a few photos of her, and then club her to death with his tripod.

Bradford’s principal target in this story is Alina Thompson (Brielle Robillard), who’s just about to finish high school. She’s a good student but she’s also interested in a modeling career, as is her Black best friend Nathalie (Bukola Ayoka), and she’s chafing under the dictates of her overprotective parents Carl (Sam Trammell) and Nancy (Ashley Jones). Alina gets screwed over by just about everyone in her life; she catches her boyfriend Nicholas (Mark Ballantyne, a quite hot hunk of man-meat who was setting off my Lust-O-Meter big-time even though I usually don’t like ’em that young) out at the local mall with another girl. Later Nathalie, who pretends to comfort her after the incident with Nicholas (who not only went out with someone else but pretended not to know her), screws Alina out of the chance to participate in a “trunk show” by falsely telling her it was canceled. Meanwhile we’ve seen Bill Bradford at work on several other women, including the woman who’s the bartender at “Bar” as well as Tracey (Laura Provenzano), a fellow high-school student whose family just moved to the L.A. area (where this is set) from Missoula, Montana and are in such an uncertain position they don’t even have a phone installed yet. We already knew the film was a period piece set in the recent past instead of the present when in the opening scene the girl who was Bill’s first victim (or at least the first one we see) offered him her phone number by writing it down on a notepad page instead of inputting it into his cell phone. We got the year nailed down when on one of their dates before Nicholas dumped her for someone else (probably someone more willing to have sex with him than Alina was, since that had been a major point of conflict between them), they went to the movie theatre at the local mall to see Flashdance, which would date this as 1983. For most of the movie we see Bradford stalk Alina at various mass photo shoots sponsored by a Southern California modeling magazine (the story takes place in the L.A. area) but never actually get her alone.

On one mass shoot his nefarious plans for Alina are actually interrupted by her father, who enters the shoot with a camera of his own and starts taking his daughter’s photo while she’s supposedly on a shoot with Bradford. Bradford gets upset at the interloper who spoiled his private shoot, and Carl Thompson tells him he’s actually Alina’s dad. Ultimately, with all her friends seemingly having abandoned her – Nicholas jilted her for that other girl and Nathalie screwed her out of the “trunk show” opportunity – Alina hangs out at the school library. Bradford runs into her there and invites her to do a solo shoot at the same locale – a natural rock quarry in one of the local parks. They agree to meet outside the library the next morning, but he doesn’t show. Where I thought this was going was that the two police detectives, a white guy named Nat Cole (Alex Gravenstein) and an Asian named Mitchell (Russell Yuen) – it’s indicative of Hollywood’s unconscious racism that the white cop gets a first name and the Asian doesn’t – would figure out where Bradford was going and arrive there in time to rescue Alina. Instead we see the cops raid Bradford’s home – they’ve been able to trace him through the lab where he has his film developed, where in one scene the man who runs it noticed Bradford literally chewing the negatives of the shots of his latest victim – and then there’s a sudden freeze-frame of Alina waiting for Bradford in vain and thinking he’s just another supposed “friend” who’s screwed her over. The freeze-frame cuts to a title reading “22 Years Later,” and 22 years later Alina is a world-famous model (obviously somewhere along the way she got more responsible professional help) whose mind is flashed back to the Bradford case by a magazine that runs a photo spread of all Bradford’s victims, including Tracey, whom she recognizes. (The older Alina is played by Kristen Kurnik and both her parents and the cops return as the same actors in heavy “age” makeup.)

The cops show up to tell her that the reason Bradford didn’t make their date that morning way back when is the cops had arrested him first, and there was a where-are-they-now end credit that Bradford was convicted and sentenced to death, but this being California where the death penalty is pretty nominal, he died in prison on Death Row without actually being executed. The Girl Who Survived: The Alina Thompson Story suffers from a lot of problems, including the absence of a Big Action Scene towards the end in which the cops would clearly and unambiguously rescue her just in time from the lethal photographer. It also doesn’t help that, like Jon McLaren in A Husband to Die For: The Lisa Aguilar Story the week before, Steve Byers was a disappointingly nondescript actor to be playing a Lifetime villain. Though we get a lot of crotch shots of him and he’s got a nice enough if not that impressive a basket, frankly Sam Trammell as Alina’s dad Carl is the sexiest guy in the film. The Girl Who Survived was directed acceptably by Michelle Ouelette, a woman director on the Lifetime list whom I’ve had pretty good things to say about in two previous posts on her movies, Danger in the House (2022) and Stolen Baby: The Murder of Heidi Broussard (2023), in which her good work was undone by silly scripts. I wouldn’t call Christine Conradt’s work on The Girl Who Survived silly, but it was certainly well below her usual reputation!