Abducted Off the Street: The Carlesha Gaither Story (Cineflex Productions, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Two nights ago (Saturday, February 10) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of movies on Lifetime, both about young women in hostage situations but at opposite ends of the quality scale. The first was the good one, Abducted Off the Street: The Carlesha Gaither Story. Written by Amani Walker, directed by Katie Boland, and featuring a mostly African-American cast (Lifetime’s way of observing Black History Month by pressing Black cast and crew members into the network’s standard “pussies in peril” formula), Abducted Off the Street begins with a disclaimer that though the movie was “inspired” by a true story, some characters have been fictionalized or turned into composites. What follows is a genuinely chilling tale of Carlesha Gaither (Riele Downs), a student nurse just finishing her training – we know she’s supposed to be good because she takes over at the last minute from an ill colleague and relates quite well to the patient she has to take on. She goes to a party with her extended family, including dad Carl Gaither (Danny Waugh), mom Keisha Gaither (Kenya Moore) – they’re separated at the start of the story but join forces to prod the local police (this is in Philadelphia) into taking Carlesha’s case seriously – and grandmother Ana (Diane Johnstone). Alas, while she’s walking home she’s accosted by a strange (in both senses) young man, Delvin Barnes (Sam Asante), who overpowers her, kidnaps her and throws her into the back of his car. For the next three days Delvin holds her against her will, taking her on a journey through various states (they go through Maryland and end up in Virginia) and periodically changing the license plates on his car to make it harder for the police to catch them.

The police investigation is led by Detective Darby (Aidan Devine), who’s bound and determined that this is not another young Black woman who’ll disappear on his watch and never be heard from again. He gets upset with his subordinate, Officer Montgomery (Dylan Taylor), after he hears Montgomery mutter “white savior syndrome” under his breath about Darby’s dedication to solving the case. The reason Darby is so committed to solving the case and doing what he can to bring Carlesha home alive is that there’s a whole wall in the police station full of photos of young Black women who disappeared under similar circumstances. We get the idea that Delvin is a serial killer, and we’ve even seen him before at work on another victim he previously kidnapped, then tortured and raped before he killed her. (Charles and I both were a bit confused by this prologue because it wasn’t immediately clear whether the woman was Carlesha and we were getting a flashback, or it was another victim of Delvin in what the law calls a “prior bad act.”) The film cuts back and forth expertly between the pressure campaign the Gaither family in general and Keisha in particular mount on the authorities to solve the crime, bring Carlesha home and prove that in at least one city Black lives do matter, and the edgy relationship between Carlesha and Delvin. Writer Walker even takes a welcome page from Christine Conradt’s playbook and makes Delvin a believable character, pathetic in the good sense of the word. I felt sorry enough for him that at the end of the movie I was hoping that at least the police would take him alive instead of shooting him at the end, and in the end he is captured alive and Carlesha is rescued.

Walker’s writing and Sam Asante’s playing make Delvin a fully rounded character, scary in his very indecisiveness, torn between playing for Carlesha’s (and our) sympathies and acting like a complete psychopathic monster with a glare-ice nature. The only thing that made me dubious about Walker’s largely successful attempt to give the character of Delvin depth instead of making him just a cardboard villain was her choice for his “Rosebud” moment: as a high-school senior, he was the victim of an elaborate practical joke in which he was encouraged to run for prom king, only to learn at the day of the prom that no one had any intention of voting for him. It was all just a prank that went hideously wrong and convinced him that women were evil and not to be trusted. At several points in the action he seems to be apologizing to Carlesha for planning to kill her, saying that it’s nothing personal but he just has to do it to relieve the pressure on his psyche. They even have at least one sexual encounter, which director Boland stages elliptically (a long-shot of Delvin’s car parked in the middle of nowhere as he demands sex from her and she reluctantly yields out of fear for her life) but which adds to the power of the story and the sense we get of Carlesha’s violation. The police finally get the clue they need from a surveillance photo of Delvin’s car, from which they are able to trace it to the dealer who sold it. The woman at the dealership tells them that because Delvin’s credit history was shaky, they put a GPS detector on the bottom before they let him drive it away.

The cops are ultimately able to trace the car and manage to apprehend Delvin and rescue Carlesha just as he’s on the point of stealing another car and thereby shaking their electronic tail completely. The credits let us know that the real Delvin Barnes was sentenced to 35 years in prison and will be eligible for parole in 2051. Abducted Off the Street is an example of Lifetime at its best: a powerful, tightly-knit story (even though they don’t always tell their true stories the way they happened, the existence of a real-life tale as the basis seems to put Lifetime’s writers on their best behavior), effective suspense-filled direction and a cast that rises to the occasions and embraces their roles: determined Carlesha, indomitable Keisha and pathos-filled Delvin.