Buying Back My Daughter (Taken Road, Front Street Pictures, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday starting at 4 p.m. my husband Charles and I binge-watched three Lifetime movies in a row, which ranged in quality from very good to not so good to downright terrible. The very good one was Buying Back My Daughter, which I’d seen before and had made such a strong impression on me I was surprised when I didn’t find a post on it on moviemagg. I realized why when I looked it up and found its original air date had been October 7, 2023 – while I was in the hospital recovering from surgery. I wanted to watch it again so I could do a moviemagg post and give this quite remarkable movie the attention it deserved. Buying Back My Daughter deals with a relentlessly overprotective mother, Dana (Meagan Good, whom I’d praised for her performance in Death Saved My Life, a 2021 Lifetime knock-off of Sleeping With the Enemy, and who’s even better here), whose husband Curtis (Roger Cross) has just moved the family – him, her and their two daughters, Alicia (Faith Wright) and Cadence, nicknamed “Kadie” (Bianca Lawrence) – from the inner city to the suburbs because he’s just got a major promotion in his job and thinks they’ll be safer there. Only he couldn’t be more wrong about that: Alicia sneaks out to a tailgate party in a vacant lot after the police shut down her parents’ party following three noise complaints. Alicia’s wanna-be boyfriend Ty offers her a ride home, which she turns down, but as she’s trying to walk home after dark she gets lost because she doesn’t know the neighborhood. Ultimately she accepts a ride from a young woman named Lori (Brennan O’Brien), who gives her a drugged drink of water. When she comes to she’s locked in a bedroom that turns out to be owned by a man named Ron (Aaron Douglas), a heavy-set middle-aged guy with a matter-of-fact attitude towards his own evil. Ron tells Alicia he’s a “businessman” and she’s now one of his “valued employees,” and he announces, “This can go easy or this can go rough.”

Alicia slowly realizes that she’s been trafficked and is about to be “turned out” as a prostitute, along with five other girls in Ron’s stable. One of the other girls befriends Alicia but also gets her hooked on drugs, and the two plot an escape from Ron’s control while trying to save enough money by skimming off the tips they get from “clients” to fund life on the outside. But the film’s main focus is on Dana and how the search for Alicia quickly takes over her entire life, leading her to quit her job (as a dental hygienist) and ignore both her husband Curtis and her younger daughter Cadence. In one chilling scene (albeit cribbed from the 1949 film Not Wanted, Ida Lupino’s first as a director, in which the heroine is an unwed mother psychologically bludgeoned into giving up her baby) Dana accosts a young “working girl” on the street, thinking it’s Alicia, only it isn’t. Dana and Curtis also try to get the police involved, only the lead officer, Lustig (Brendon Zub), couldn’t possibly be less interested. Lustig tells Dana that most teenagers who disappear are just running away from home for a few days and will ultimately turn up again. Lustig’s partner, Officer Marks (Laura Mac), is more sympathetic but can’t get Lustig to take the case seriously. Later she tells Dana that she herself was trafficked as a teenager and held for nine months. Ultimately Dana spots photos of Alicia, under the name “Princess,” on line and decides literally to buy back her daughter – or at least to rent her “services” for a night and then reclaim her.

She actually gets Alicia back, but she gets her back in a highly traumatized state that leads Dana and Alicia to argue. She’s also quite obviously “jones-ing” from withdrawal from the drugs Ron and her “friend” in his stable got her hooked on, and just as the “friend” actually made it out but ultimately was recaptured when she went on the street looking for a fix and the drug dealer reported her to Ron, Alicia ends up going back to Ron more or less voluntarily because Ron can supply her drugs. Ultimately the cops raid Ron’s operation on the basis of the information Dana has supplied them, but Dana doesn’t make the same mistake with Alicia she did the first time she got her back. She enrolls Alicia in a drug rehab program and tells her to take however long she needs in the program before she’s ready to resume a normal life. Buying Back My Daughter works on every conceivable level: Barbara Marshall’s script is well constructed and makes sense, Troy Scott’s (a Black man, by the way) direction is assured and creates nail-biting suspense, and the cast is uniformly good from top to bottom. Meagan Good makes Dana a fully realized creation, a believable human being whose fierce dedication to recovering Alicia jeopardizes her love for the rest of her family; and Faith Wright as Alicia is equally fine, charting the character’s journey from young daughter testing her limits to unwilling prostitute to the flotsam she is when Dana finally rescues her (the first time) effectively and movingly. Roger Cross as the clueless Curtis, Bianca Lawrence as Cadence (who yearns for her mother’s love and laments that it’s all being diverted to her missing sister), and Aaron Douglas as a chillingly ordinary Ron are also great in their roles. Buying Back My Daughter offers the usual mix of Lifetime elements, but it’s an uncommonly good film in their formula and the people come across not as puppets being put through a story, but as real people with complex motives and drives.