The Disappearance of Cari Farver (Howard Braunstein Films, Milojo Productions,, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night at 8 Lifetime showed a movie called The Disappearance of Cari Farver, based on a real-life murder case from Nebraska in 2012 – though in the real case it took until 2016 to catch the culprit and hold them accountable for their crimes, while in the film it seems to happen a lot faster than that. It’s an interesting movie, not only because of the crime’s macabre aspects but because the principals were mostly in their late 30’s and already had been divorced and had teenage kids, but they were acting like horny young adolescents just having come into sexual maturity. After a brief opening scene and a typical Lifetime chyron reading, “Four months earlier,” the first thing we see are a man and a woman,obviously with the hots for each other, escaping a crowded dance club and heading for the roof of the building, where they start fucking then and there. We see in the corner of the screen another, relatively older couple coming up to the roof, presumably for more sedate purposes, and for a moment we’re convinced our two lovebirds will be caught, but they aren’t. It turns out the two hot-to-trot people on that roof are Dave Kroupa (Zach Gilford), a local mechanic who works at a transmission shop, and Shanna “Liz” Golyar (Alicia Witt, top-billed). However, Liz isn’t the only woman in Dave’s life; he’s also seeing Cari Farver (Rebecca Amzallag), a divorcée with a teenage son named Sam (a hauntingly beautiful young man named Brandon McEwan who turns in some of the best acting in the film).

Dave met Cari when her car malfunctioned on her way to work and she brought it into Dave’s garage to be repaired; at first Dave was reluctant to ask for her phone number, but, egged on by Dave’s boss Nick (Derek Kun), he finally gets her contact information and they start dating. Dave makes it clear to both the new women in his life that he doesn’t want an exclusive relationship with either of them – just casual sex – and though they’re no longer a couple he’s still very much involved with his ex-wife and the mother of his kids, Sara Brower (Lisa Marie Giacinto). Cari wants to move in with Dave but Dave is still too commitment-shy for that, and their relationship (such as it is) goes off the rails when Dave gets a call from Liz asking him to come over and unstick her bedroom window – only she’s had other things in mind and those other things duly happen when Liz greets him wearing a bathrobe and opens it in front of him. The next time Dave sees Cari he tells her what happened, and Cari seemingly goes ballistic with jealousy by clearing all her stuff out of his place and disappearing. Dave then receives a text message ostensibly from Cari declaring that the relationship is over and she never wants to see him again. During the next week or so no one hears from Cari, other than via text messages and e-mails. Cari’s mother Nancy Rainey (Lea Thompson) – she’s listed as “Nancy Farver” on the movie’s imdb.com page but she’s called by a different last name in the actual film – gets suspicious because she and Cari have called every day, and she’s even more suspicious when she doesn’t show up to take her father Dennis (Chris Sigurdson) for a medical appointment for his cancer.

When Cari doesn’t show up either for her cousin’s wedding or her dad’s funeral once he croaks, mom is certainshe’s met with foul play and she reports it to the police. The police assign two detectives, a Black one named Miller (Milton Barnes) and a white one named Adams (Bradley Sawatzky), and as the barrage of texts and e-mails allegedly from Cari keep coming in, the two decided to split their investigation, with Adams acting under the assumption that Cari is still alive and Miller assuming that Cari is dead and someone else is sending the harassing texts and e-mails in her stead. Eventually the cops obtain the phone records for both Dave and Liz, along with their permission to download everything. In the meantime the harassment campaign waged against Liz by Cari – or whoever is impersonating her – has escalated, from spray-painting Liz’s garage door with the words “DAVE’S WHORE” to burning down Liz’s house with all fou9r of her beloved pets inside. Liz even reports being accosted by a stranger with a gun who shot her inthe thigh. The police at first suspect Sara Browne, Dave’s ex, but ultimately, by discovering presumably deleted images on Liz’s phone, they conclude Liz herself was the killer: she murdered Cari out of jealousy and then used her electronic devices to impersonate her and create the impression that Cari is still alive. In one of her pretend e-mails Liz actually reveals details of the crime – including that it took place in Cari’s own SUV and Liz stabbed Cari repeatedly, leaving blood all over the passenger seat in the front – and among the images they find on Liz’s phone is a shot of a decomposing foot with a tattoo on it of a Chinese character meaning “Mother.”

Nancy recognized the tattoo as one Cari had had done, and once they know where to look the police find blood over the front passenger seat of Cari’s car, match it to DNA provided by Nancy from an old hair brush used by Cari, and determine that it was Cari’s blood in the car. Eventually Liz is convincted of Cari’s murder and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, and an ambiguous title tells us that Dave and Sara have continued to “co-parent” their children – the ambiguity comes from the fact that during the later stages of the film Dave moved back in with Sara after the unknown assailant threw a rock at Dave’s bedroom and thereby threatened the kids – and though there’s no hint that Dave and Sara have reconciled and become a sexually or maritally inivolved couple, the implication is they’re still living together and jointly raising the kids. What makes The Disappearance of Cari Farver so fascinating is the sheer elaborateness of the imposture Liz staged to make it seem like Cari were still alive – according to an article on the Cinemaholic Web site (https://thecinemaholic.com/cari-farver-murder/), she spent 40 to 50 hours a day online for four years pretending to be Cari (as I mentioned above, the real case took a lot longer to soive than the movie makes it seem) – and also the role of electronics both in committing the crime and in solving it. Also one has to wonder about the psyche of someone who would literally burn down her house and shoot herself in the thigh just to maintain the imposture that some dastardly criminal was out to get her.