by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Still,
The moment Maya arrives in the town, we meet Jamie Nelson (Jaime M. Callica), whom she remembers from her high-school days as having such deep forehead scars (which he acquired from being in a car accident that killed his mother, sort of like Jayne Mansfield and Mariska Hargitay) that school bullies called him “Frankenstein.” Maya didn’t recognize Jamie at first because plastic surgery has got rid of the scars, but he’s still so clingy and creepy that almost from the moment he entered, I had pegged him as the principal villain. I was especially convinced he “dun it” because in virtually all Lifetime movies, people who were teased as kids turn out to be so psychologically scarred by it that they turn into psychos and/or crooks … and so it turned out here. Maya gets a surprise late-night visit from Vince, who has got worried and flown out halfway across the country to look after her (how much money do these people have, anyway?), and she gets the feeling she’s being stalked, especially when there’s a mysterious blackout at Maya’s B&B and Pete (Patrick Keating), the desk clerk, freaks out and goes all queeny. (Keating’s performance proves they didn’t break the mold after they made Franklin Pangborn; though Keating doesn’t look that much like Pangborn – he’s taller, blonder and considerably more casual in his dress – the fluttery voice, gestures and intonations are very reminiscent. I kind of felt sorry for him because that small town probably doesn’t have much of a Gay scene.)
With Jamie romancing her for his own dark reasons – he eventually explains he’s had a lifelong crush on Maya and kidnapped Brittany just so Maya could come to the town and investigate (yeah, right – even for a Lifetime screenwriter like Aurora Ferlin, that’s pretty far-fetched coincidence-mongering) – and both Elizabeth and Vince hammering at her, Elizabeth for a story (whether she has enough information to write one or not) and Vince for a reconciliation – Maya gets lured out to a deserted movie-theatre parking lot and Vince is knocked unconscious and hospitalized due to an attack by an unknown assailant (unknown to the characters but not to us!). Maya is kidnapped by Jamie and taken to the old deserted high school where Jamie worked first as a student and then a teacher before the place was condemned and scheduled to be torn down for a new development. Fortunately for her, Jamie isn’t particularly good at tying people up; she’s able to loosen her bonds and find Brittany, who’s still alive despite the existence of what looks like a morgue photograph of her corpse. The two of them try to escape, only Jamie corners Brittany and is about to strangle her when Maya sneaks up from behind him and clobbers him with a lead pipe. The movie ends with Maya and Vince reconciling – the only thing that had led them to separate in the first place was her commitment to her career and the sheer amount of time she was away from him pursuing it – and she gets yet another story for Chicago Collective that attracts national attention.
She Went Missing could have been considerably better if it weren’t so damned predictable – we know right away that Jamie is the bad guy and Brittany’s hapless (white) ex-husband, Richard Martin (Steve Baran), is an innocent red herring even before Jamie kills him because he was about to sell Maya a photo of Brittany with the new boyfriend she had just started dating when she disappeared. As it stands, despite capable direction by Danny J. Boyle (decidedly not the Danny Boyle who made Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire), She Went Missing is so predictable it comes off like one of the Lifetime movies LIfetime itself is parodying in its own promos.
