Girl Who Vanished (Maverick Film, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The second Lifetime movie I watched last night (Sunday, February 15) – and my husband Charles joined me for most of it – was called Girl Who Vanished, and like previous Lifetime telecasts Lost Boy in 2015 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2015/07/lost-boy-legrand-productions-lifetime.html) and The Boy Who Vanished a.k.a. The Forgotten Son (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2025/06/the-boy-who-vanished-aka-forgotten-son.html), it’s about a long-lost child who was supposedly kidnapped eight years earlier who seemingly returns to the fold. In this case the mother is Kate Tanner (Chelsea Gilson), the father – who divorced Kate over the trauma of losing their daughter and who, like his opposite number in To Catch a Cheater, returns to the family to help acclimate their daughter on her homecoming – is Matt (Jon Eric Hoffman). The returnee is Emily (Isabella Carlsen) and the younger sister who wasn’t kidnapped and has had to live the past eight years traumatized by her mother’s overprotectiveness is Lily (Rylee Reagan, top-billed). The film opens with Lily sneaking into the Tanners’ home after a night out with her age-peer girlfriends and Kate catching her and grounding her. Then Emily shows up, insisting that she’s really the Tanners’ long-lost daughter and supplying a wealth of background information to make the identity convincing. Emily even takes a DNA test which says she’s the Tanners’ biological offspring. Kate is overjoyed at the return of her daughter, but Lily is sure something is “off” about her and the new girl, whoever she is, is not Emily.

The police assign a psychiatrist, Dr. Salazar (Lisha Hackney, one of the heavy-set African-Americans Lifetime likes to cast as authority figures), to treat Emily and help her over the traumas of adjusting to her new environment – Emily says she spent the intervening eight years living with a single man who just wanted a child of his own to raise. Only Dr. Salazar is nonplussed that Emily doesn’t show the usual signs of trauma one would expect from a child who was actually kidnapped and forced to live with strangers for that long a time. Lily asks for an appointment to discuss Emily’s case with Dr. Salazar, but the day she’s supposed to meet her Dr. Salazar is found dead in her office, which is apparently a live/work space. Next Emily does an interview with podcaster Naomi Ackerman (Jessica DeBonville), who specializes in stories about traumatized kids, only Naomi holds back on airing the interview because she’s suspicious of Emily’s lack of affect during it. Lily calls Ackerman and makes an appointment to see her, but when she goes to the scheduled meeting place Ackerman, too, is dead, murdered in what was apparently a robbery gone bad. Next Lily is accosted by John Norris (Phil Talamonti), a former police detective who worked Emily’s disappearance when it happened, only he became convinced that Emily had been murdered by one or both of his parents. (Was writer Daniel West thinking of JonBenet Ramsey here? One of the most mysterious aspects of that case was that the only people who could have had access to her were her parents, and yet they had no discernible motive because they were making tons of money exploiting JonBenet in children’s beauty pageants and her death would end that gravy train.)

Norris’s efforts to implicate the Tanners in Emily’s disappearance ended up costing him his job; he drifted into alcoholism but he hung around the scenes, still convinced that one or both of the adult Tanners did in Emily. Norris contacts Lily and asks her to notice any parts of the Tanners’ home that had been changed since the days before Emily’s disappearance. Kate had kept the house exactly the same as it was before Emily left, including the décor of her room which was adorned with posters for boy bands like the “Boulevard Boys” whom Emily especially liked. Unfortunately, the same mystery killer who knocked off Dr. Salazar and Ackerman strikes against Norris, sneaking into his car, strangling him from the back seat, and planting liquor bottles in the car so it will look like he killed himself accidentally while driving drunk. But the information Norris gave Lily allows her to find out the one spot in or around the house that had been changed – a new mini-garden Kate planted after Emily’s disappearance – and Lily starts digging it out and finds [spoiler alert!] the remains of her real sister. It turns out [double spoiler alert!] that Kate actually killed the real Emily during an argument (though director David Benullo inserted a brief closeup that hinted that the killer might have been Emily’s dad Matt), then covered it up by burying her in that newly planted mini-garden. The false “Emily” turns out to be Rachel Sullivan, who concocted the scheme along with a scapegrace boyfriend who only appears in one scene and then is dispatched by the dauntless Kate, who burns him to death by spilling gasoline outside the van in which he lives and then igniting it with a flair.

The two of them researched the real Emily from the press interviews the Tanners gave after her “disappearance” and coached Rachel to pass as Emily. The DNA test was faked from Lily’s own, which Rachel obtained from Lily’s retainer. Lily caught her out with one of the classic strategies used in impersonation stories: inventing a false memory (in this case, a treehouse where the two sisters supposedly played) and catching “Emily” out on it. The film ends with a brutal confrontation between Kate and Lily at the real Emily’s gravesite, though luckily the police arrive and arrest both Kate and Rachel (my husband Charles wondered why Rachel was arrested), though Lily ultimately visits Rachel in prison. Girl Who Vanished was a decent enough Lifetime thriller, though as with To Catch a Cheater one gets the impression that it could have been a lot better if writer West had cooled it on the melodramatics and not taken the easy way out by making mom the killer, thereby creating the problem Fritz Lang identified with the trick ending he was forced to use in his last American film, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. In that film the supposedly innocent man, a reporter who frames himself for murder to prove how easy it is to convict the innocent on circumstantial evidence, turns out actually to be guilty of murder, and as Lang complained to his producer, you can’t create a central character, make the audience identify with and feel for them, and then in the last two minutes drop the switcheroo on the audience and reveal that they’re really evil.