by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark
Yesterday afternoon I watched a rerun of a Lifetime movie I had bypassed on its “premiere” showing the week before because my husband Charles was home and I wanted to spare him. Surprise: it turned out to be quite good. It was called Girl in the Basement and was based on a true story, though the real case happened in Amstetten, Austria from 1984 to 2002 and Lifetime’s filmmakers, director Elisabeth Röhm (whom I’ve known before primarily as an actress, one of the prosecutors in the Law and Order franchise) and writers Manu Boyer, Leslie Greif and Barbara Marshall, moved the setting to the United States, to the sort of typical Anywhere, U.S.A. suburban community that’s usually played in Lifetime movies by Anywhere, Canada, and changed the name of the kidnapped heroine from Elisabeth Fischl to Sara Douglas (Stefanie Scott). Girl in the Basement differs from previous Lifetime “Girl in the … ” movies like Girl in the Bunker and Girl in the Box not only in the sheer length of her captivity (20 years – and in the real case it was 25!) but the fact that the captor was her own father. Sara is three weeks’ away from her 18th birthday when she sneaks out of the house to go out to a party with her motorcycle-riding (though more a Honda than a Harley) boyfriend Christofer (Jake Etheridge, who’s drop-dead gorgeous and if anything actually looks younger in some of his later scenes!). Christofer takes her to a beach, where he brings his guitar, sings her a song and pretty obviously has sex with her (though since the character is supposed to be underage Röhm and cinematographer Pierluigi Malavasi have to avert their cameras so we don’t get the soft-core porn scene that’s livened up a lot of Lifetime movies).
The next morning Sara’s insanely strict father Don (former “Brat Packer” Judd Nelson, still not-bad looking but he obviously has not aged well) intercepts her as she’s coming home. With Sara’s mom Irene (Joely Fisher, Carrie Fisher’s half-sister) totally oblivious, and Sara’s sister Amy (Emily Topper) escaping her macabre fate just because she was older, already legally an adult and away at college most of the time, Don tricks Sara into going into the basement of their home, where a previous owner had built a concrete room to use as a fallout shelter, and locks her in. And keeps her there. For 20 years. To explain her disappearance he tells his wife that she ran off with a guy named Steve and is traveling across the country with him. He gives the same story to Christofer when he shows up looking for Sara and seemingly genuinely concerned about her. Meanwhile, Don keeps Sara in that basement redoubt and tells her that if she wants to earn privileges – like a blanket to keep warm or a TV to relieve the boredom – she has to “earn” them, which we soon learn means she has to have sex with him. Don also insists that Sara call him “Don” instead of “Dad,” especially after all the sex he’s forcing her to have with him has the inevitable biological result and she starts having kids. First is daughter Marie (Emma Myers), then son Michael (Braxton Bjerken), then another son named Tommy – though when Sara protests that it’s hard enough for her to raise three kids on the limited supplies of food and clothes he’s providing her, so he agrees to take Tommy and raise him himself, getting Sara to write a note saying that she’s sending her new baby back to her dad because she can’t handle a child in her current circumstances. Alas, Sara tries to sneak out word to her mom about her true fate – through all this mom has gone on believing that her daughter has disappeared and tries to get Don to hire a private detective to find her – which he, of course, refuses to do.
Sara included in the bundle containing Tommy a note explaining that she was really being held in the basement of their home, but Don finds the note and punishes her for writing it by beating her and turning off the electricity to the room – which means Sara and the kids will die because the place needs power to run the ventilation system, without which the inhabitants will suffocate. (It’s a good thing this wasn’t taking place recently in Texas!) Eventually, Don beats Sara within an inch of her life while she’s pregnant with yet another child, causing the baby to be stillborn, and her Kafkaesque ordeal continues until Don gets laid off from his job (we don’t have much of a clue what he did for a living, except that it involved a briefcase he brought to and from work) and receives a notice that he’s about to lose his house to foreclosure. Like the protagonist in Lifetime’s 2015 movie His Secret Family (which I wrote about at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2015/08/his-secret-family-feifer.html), Don decides he needs to cut expenses by eliminating Sara and her inconvenient kids – literally. He runs a hose from the tailpipe of his car to the window in the basement that it’s only source of air (it has a ventilating fan in it), intending to fill the room with carbon monoxide. Only Tommy (Jake Nuttall), the only one of Don’s incestuous progeny who’s been allowed to have a normal childhood and is supposedly bigger than Mike even though he’s younger), catches his dad (whom he thinks of as his granddad) and Don stops the car and cuts short his attempt at a summary execution of his sex slave and her kids.
The plot finally unravels when Marie has an asthma attack and Sara manages to talk Don into taking her to a hospital because otherwise she’s going to die – and Sara spots a nurse she thinks will be sympathetic and manages to slip out of her dad’s control and tell her story. A police officer alerted by the nurse arrests Don and Sara’s ordeal is finally over – though the writing committee on this one couldn’t have been less interested in the culture shock people who had lived in captivity so long, especially ones who’d been born into it and had never experienced the normal world at all, would experience on their release – the issue Emma Donoghue dramatized so powerfully in her novel Room and her script for the equally intense film Lenny Abrahamson made from it (still to my mind the best works ever done about this situation – and I’m surprised the “More like this” button on the imdb.com page for Girl in the Basement didn’t mention Room). Despite that, however, Girl in the Basement is one of Lifetime’s better fact-inspired movies – as I’ve written about previous films in their “Ripped from the Headlines!” series (actually a promotional line they took from the way Warner Bros. billed some of their most au courant films in the 1930’s). It’s beautifully directed, sensitively written and chillingly acted. Judd Nelson’s performance as the villain is shocking in its very ordinariness – instead of making him an eye-rolling baddie they make him a matter-of-fact guy, someone you could well imagine having as a neighbor, shooting the breeze with about your jobs and your kids, and who carries on his depravities with total indifference to the morality (or lack thereof).
It’s the sort of characterization that leads me once again to Hannah Arendt’s description of Adolf Eichmann – she called her book about him “A Report on the Banality of Evil,” though when I read the book I thought she might better have called it “the evil of banality,” since Eichmann (as Arendt described him) had so few moral sensibilities he simply was “just following orders” because that’s what you did; you didn’t reflect either way on the morality (or lack thereof) of what your bosses told you to do. The writers of Girl in the Basement don’t attempt an exploration of What Made Don Run, but in some ways that just makes their movie scarier: the idea that a monster could be hiding in plain sight, doing absolutely horrible things to his own family, and probably justifying it (if he bothered to justify it at all) by telling himself, “She was a mouthy little brat – she deserves this!” And Stefanie Scott as Sara is almost as good as Nelson is as her abuser; she takes her years of punishment with a gritty determination to survive as best she can and be as good a mother to her children as possible despite the preposterous conditions in which they’ve come into the world and are being forced to live in it. About the only fault I could find with her is she doesn’t seem to get any older in the 20 years she’s being held – almost nobody still looks at 37 so much like they did two decades earlier! – and neither does Jake Etheridge as her boyfriend Christofer (ya remember Christofer?), who in the one element of the movie that smacks of Lifetime’s usual preposterous and unbelievable plotting is still waiting for Sara and ready to reunite with her even as 20 years pass and one would have expected he’d have gone on with his life, married someone else and had kids of his own by then. Still, Girl in the Basement is an absolutely gripping thriller, an intensely told story that grabs you and not only holds your attention but taps your emotion, the sort of film that makes you forget or ignore any plot holes because you’re so caught up in the characters and their travails.
