Girl in the Video (ITN Productions, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Alas, as so often happens on Lifetime, the second film my husband Charles and I watched last night – the previous night’s (Saturday, January 13) “premiere,” Girl in the Video, was so similar in overall plot premises to Buying Back My Daughter it suffered big-time from the comparison. This time the mother hunting down her kidnapped daughter is also African-American – Mo Meyer (Cush Jumbo) – but she’s a widow, her husband Aaron having died three years before of heart failure. In this version the kidnap victim is her younger child, daughter Krissy (Tia May Watts), and her other sibling is an older son, Robbie (Amaree Ali). Cush Jumbo is even a similar physical “type” to Meagan Good – middle-aged but relatively slender, medium height and with brown rather than black skin – though Jumbo (is that really her name?) hardly delivers the subtle, nuanced performance Good did in a similar role. Then again, her writers, Matthew Broughton and Bruce Kennedy, hardly give her as much to work with as Barbara Marshall gave Meagan Good. In this version Krissy is lured away by an online “sting” operation by a well-honed psychopath, Jack Sweeney (Andrew Lee Potts), who bought the identity of a dead Black teenage boy for $8 on the “dark Web” and used it to catfish Krissy into meeting him at an out-of-the-way mountain cabin. There he abducted her and took her to an ordinary suburban home, where he proceeded to torture her at regular intervals for the delectation of sickos on the “dark Web” who wanted to see a young girl tortured in real time on a live stream.

For a little while Broughton and Kennedy tried to pull Christine Conradt’s trick of making Jack a figure of pathos, giving him extended monologues in which he tries to tell Krissy that he’s really not such a bad person at all. He’s just been put upon and depressed because his wife left him and won’t let him see their daughter Molly – though in the end that turns out to be B.S. because Jack and his ex are in regular communication with each other and Molly visits him often. In fact, it was on one of Molly’s visits to her dad that she took along her video game controller, which Jack was able to use to send Krissy messages in Molly’s identity talking up the nonexistent boy she was supposedly meeting at that mountain cabin That Night. (That in itself suggests a plot glitch because Krissy and Molly are supposed to be friends, but Krissy doesn’t connect the “Molly” who’s Jack’s daughter to the “Molly” she knows from school. Or are we supposed to believe she’s so traumatized she doesn’t make the connection?) Midway through the movie Jack takes off the hood he was wearing when he kidnapped Krissy, telling her chillingly that it doesn’t matter if she sees what he really looks like since he’s not going to let her out alive anyway. This time around at least Mo the mother doesn’t have to deal with uncaring cops; Lt. Audrey Brennan (Wendy Glenn), the local police official in the town where this takes place – the fictional locale of Havenbrook, Washington state – is on it right away (and for some reason she wears a necktie throughout as part of her uniform). So is the FBI, led by special agent Ray Fry (Matthew Marsden) – even though Mo gets exasperated with the lack of progress on the case and at one point she literally assaults him in the police office. Fortunately, instead of swearing out a warrant for her arrest, he actually says she’s right and being attacked by the victim’s mom leads him to investigate the case that much more thoroughly and effectively.

During one of the online telecasts Krissy blurts out that her captor’s name is Jack – something she knows because he’s told her – and though he cuts her off immediately she starts to say his last name and gets out enough of it that the law enforcers know it starts with “S.” Clever in a lot of ways – his subscribers are paying for his live feeds with cryptocurrency so there’s presumably no way the payments can be traced to him – Jack is predictably stupid in others, including holding Krissy in his own home. Eventually the cops trace his video postings, though instead of raiding Jack’s own home they break into the home of his ex-wife and their daughter Molly (ya remember Molly?). Fortunately the two women are able to give the police Jack’s address, and they arrive just in time to rescue Krissy from being killed on camera for the delectation of the sickos in his online audience. There’s also a red herring in the person of Fred Weaver (Kristopher Bosch), who briefly becomes suspect number one; he’s Krissy’s English teacher and he gave her a copy of a sexually explicit mainstream novel inscribed with x’s and o’s to indicate kisses. When questioned, Weaver says he gives books like that to all his honor students, and eventually we learn that his school district suspended him – so we get at least the hint that Krissy’s abduction led the cops to bust a pedophile English teacher as well even though he had alibis for every time Jack went online with his torture videos. Also director Neil Rawles carefully avoids showing us any of the actual torture Jack inflicts on Krissy, though at one point her brother Robbie demands to be allowed to watch the videos and he’s so horrified by them he goes through the rest of the movie in a blue funk over what’s being done to his little sister. Even within the strictures of basic cable, we could have seen hints that would have brought home to us the sheer horror of what Krissy is going through. And of course once she’s rescued everything returns to normal, with no hint of the lingering traumas from Krissy’s abuse that were so well dramatized with Alicia in Buying Back My Daughter. Maybe Girl in the Video wouldn’t have seemed so relatively weak if we hadn’t seen it right after Buying Back My Daughter, but watching them back to back only made Girl in the Video seem even worse than it was.