Girl ini Room 13 (Motel Productions, Inc., Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night at 8 I watched one of the better Lifetime movies I’ve seen lately, Girn in Room 13, about a typical suburban family, the Atkinsons: mother Janie (Anne Heche), father Burt (Matt Hamilton) – though in fact he’s just the stepfather: the actual father is not part of the picture and it’s not clear whether Janie divorced him or he died – and daughters Grace (Larissa Dias) and Toni (Erica Brusi). Toni is cultivating a career as an online “influencer” and is shooting a TikTok video when she complains that Burt is playing with Grace’s dog and it’s barking all over her soundtrack, ruining it. But the focus oif the film is on the other Daughter, Grace, who’s had a drug problem and been in and out of rehab three times. She’s landed a job waitressing at a coffee shop (i.e., a cheap restaurant as opposed to a coffeehouse) whose owner is a strikingly handsome young blond man who, screenwriter Maria Nation hints, is himself a sort of blood relative of Grace’s mom. It’s not clear whether he’s her older son, her younger brother or some other connection. Grace’s latest downfall starts when a co-worker named Brett gives her a bundle of cash and tells her to deliver it to Ritchie (Max Montesi, who just because he’;s drop-dead gorgeous and director Elisabeth Röhm – best known as assistant district attorney Serena Southerlyn on Law and Order from 2001 to 2005 – gives us plenty of crotch shots showing off his quite impressive basket we know early on he must be a villain).

Ritchie (incidentally his name is spelled “Richie” on the imdb.com page for this film but it’s “Ritchie” on a note we see in the film itself) has set it u p with Brett to lure Grace into delivering the cash for him, saying he needs ot for medical care for his son Toby whose mother is threatening to take him back and demand sole custody. When Grace borrows her mother’s car and drives out to the proverbial deserted location with her dog in tow, Ritchie grabs her and presses his cock against her in the parking lot,then takes control and throws her in his car. He drives off and holds her captive in the titular Room !3 of the Garden State Parkway Motel – though it’s not until the end of this movie that we find out the venue’s name. Ritchie intends to hold her there for about 10 days or so until he can break her will to resist, whereupon he’s going to sell her to a human trafficker. It’s not exactly the freshest of dramatic material – the first feature film made by Universal in 1912, Traffic in Souls, was about human trafficking (or “white slavery,” as it was called then, a term that speaks volumes about the social prejudices against trafficking victims then and now; in Girl in Room 13 a sympatehtic cop tells the Atkinsons that it’s not just runaways and people of color that get traficked; 83 percent of trafficking victims are living at home when they’re abducted and the Atkinsons shouldn’t think their child is immune from being trafficked simply because she’s white), but director Röhm and writer Nation stage it effectively and create a real sense of terror.

Like most such dramas, the film alternates between the terrorized abductee and the grieving parents, and as with Liam Neeson’s role in Taken (a fil to which this one owes a great deal), Anne Heche’s character becomes an avenging angel, utterly impatient with the authorities – she tells ome cop who’s trying to explain to her how little they can do, especially since Grace is legally an adult, “How would you feel if it was your own daughter?” – and determined to track down Grace if it’s the last thing she ever does. Burt is skeptical and is convinced that Grace relapsed into drug use again (incidentally the imdb.com synopsis says Grace got hooked on drugs in the first place when she injured herself playing sports and was prescribed opioid painkillers; it’s established that Grace was a champion diver in high school but gave it up for mysterious reasons, but the film itself does not link her drug use to a sports injury). He’s even more skeptical when he tells Janie to look up Grace’s credit card records (which they can legally do since they’re co-signers on her account) and they learn that Grace’s card has been suspended because she’s been pulling a “refund scam”: buying items and then immediately returning them and demanding refunds in cash. Fortunately, a Black woman cashier at a store where Grace,under Ritchie’s orders, pulled this scam remembered her, and when Janie questions her she gives her the clue she needs to find her daughter at last. Tracing her to the garden State Parkway Motel,

Janie finds Grace literally in the nick of time as the buyer whom Ritchie has lined up for her insists on “trying the merchandise” before he closes the deal, and though Grace has routinely been raped by Ritchie during the 10 days he’s held her captive – the usual time, we’re told, it takes for a human trafficker to “break” his victim and overcome her will to resist the new life he’s chosen for her – Maria Nation is a subtle enough writer she drops hints of even more sordid fares that might be in store for oor heroine. In one chilling scene Ritchie has lined up a middle-aged, vaguely Asian-looking man to be Grace’s first “john,” and he asks the customer if he can film it and post the video on the Internet as advertising. Yes, the man tells Ritchle, only please don’t show my face because I wouldn’t want my kids to see this. Later on, as Janie is hunting through the motel for the room in which Grace is being held, she comes upon another room in which three half’naked young women are frolicking on a bed, and we’re not sure whether they’re Lesbians having a three-way or more trafficking victims being readied for their next customers (or maybe both). The film begins and ends with voiceovers from Grace herself, and at the end we see her in the swimming pool again doing her trademark 2 ½-turn backwards dive. She tells us she’s still clean and getting her life back together after her ordeal.

A final credit that surprised me said that the film was “dedicated to the memory of Anne Heche,” who died August 11, 2022 at the age of 53. I must say I was long prejudiced against Anne Heche because of her bizarre role in Ellen De Generes’s coming-out – years later, long after they’d broken up, Ellen said she would have handied it better if her partner at the time had been an actual Lesbian instead of a basically straight woman exploring her Gay side – and for the craziness she indulged in after that, inclu9ding her claim that she’d been visited by space aliens. Though imdb.com lists six other Anne Heche movies after this one as well as an ongoing role in a TV mini-series, The Idol, Girl in Room 13 would be a great credit for Anne Heche to end her career on; she plays the role with life and sinew and puts lots of flesh on the bones of what would otherwise have been a tiresoomely stereotyped vengeful-mom character. Despite its hackneyed elements, Girl in Room 13 is an excellent thriller and Anne Hecne’s powerful, authoritative performance really “makes” this movie (and kudos to Elisabeth Röhm as a director for getting it out of her!).