Vanished: Searching for My Sister (Big Dreams Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday afternoon Lifetime re-ran the TV movie they had “premiered” the day before, Vanished: Searching for My Sister, followed by a new “premiere,” Deadly House Call. Vanished: Searching for My Sister was an O.K. production in that sub-genre of film noir in which an ordinary person living a normal life suddenly finds herself in the noir underworld, usually as the result of the sudden death or disappearance of a family member who, unbeknownst to the protagonist, had been living a double life. I was also intrigued by the name of the star, Tatyana Ali, if only because I found myself wondering if she was any relation to Muhammad Ali (no). In Vanished the younger and unrelated Ali plays Jada, who’s concerned that her sister Kayla (also played by Tatyana Ali, though she disappears after the first commercial break and never reappears again) was crucial to the plot because the two women have to look alike for the rest of the story to work. Jada and Kayla are both in the process of breaking up from their husbands and making new lives for themselves as single mothers – Jada and Kayla are both Black, but while Jada’s husband is also Black both Kayla’s husband, Warren Davis, and the boyfriend she’s seeing on the side, Gary Burton, were white. (One was surprised that this Gary Burton had the same name as the legendary real-life jazz vibraphonist, who is also one of the very few major jazz musicians who has come out as openly Gay. We’re ill-represented in the ranks of the majors: aside from the classic blues queens like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, the only other Gay or Bisexual jazz musicians I can think of are Bix Beiderbecke and Billy Strayhorn, and Bix has been disputed.)

Kayla has had a history of drug abuse, though at the start of the story – at least according to Jada – she’d been “clean” for two years. Jada suspects that Kayla has relapsed under the influence of Gary Burton and she starts hanging out at two bars Kayla was known to frequent, where guys start hitting on her thinking she’s Kayla. The last time Jada actually saw Kayla her sister begged her for a check for $2,000, which Kayla explained she needed to pay first and last month’s rent for a new apartment she can live in with her daughter Olivia (Aria Jennal Pulliam), but later Jada discovers the check uncashed and it’s the first intimation she has that Kayla has met with foul play. Jada makes herself a nuisance with the two women detectives assigned to investigate the case by the local police department, and at one point she accuses the lead detective of putting in only the most minimal effort and caring about the outcome only in the most perfunctory way. Then the detective whips out a snapshot of another woman and explains that it’s her wife, who disappeared 15 years before and the case never was solved. It’s the rawest and most emotional scene in the whole story, even though her partner was so butch I mentally remixed the story and decided they were “partners” in more than just the police sense.

Eventually Jada turns over the mattress in Kayla’s home – she seems to be able to let herself in any time she wants to and the cops are understandably frustrated that she keeps doing that and potentially contaminating a potential crime scene – and finds it sticky with blood. The cops arrest Warren, Kayla’s husband, but they can’t hold him until tne test results on the blood’s DNA come forth in two days and definitively identify the blood as Kayla’s. So they have to let him go, and in the meantime Jada makes yet another trip to Kayla’s apartment. Warren corners her there and he confesses to killing Kayla after she cheated on him (oops, had “extra-relational activities”) and relapsed into drug use. He calls the mother of his child a scumbag whore, and even from prison he recruits a fellow prisoner to knock off his former sister-in-law so she can’t testify against him in court. Only the fellow prisoner apparently reports the offer to the police, quite obviously hoping for a break on its own sentence, and so Warren is going to rot in jail while Jada appears ready not only to reconcile with her own (Black) ex-husband, but he arranges with his office to work a desk job instead of being a traveling salesman so the two can get back together and make a home not only for Jada’s biological daughter but her niece Olivia as well.

Vanished: Searching for My Sister isn’t a patch on the most obvious antecedents in the noir sub-genre – the 1949 thriller The Reckless Moment and its quite good 2001 remake The Deep End (in which the protagonist was an ordinary housewife and the victim was her straight daughter in The Reckless Moment and her Gay son in The Deep End) – and writer Christina Welch filled her script with so many red herrings, including a menacing drug dealer riding a motorcycle and threatening Our Heroine with murder if she doesn’t come up with the money Kayla owed him, it’s hard to keep track of them all. Still, I quite liked Vanished even though Charles guessed early on that Warren the firefighter husband of Kayla would turn out to be the killer even sooner than I did, if only because writer Welch was not setting it up to make it seem like Kayla was still alive and attempting to take over Jada’s existence à la A Stolen Life!