The Girl Who Wasn't Dead (NSM Productions, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2024)

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

On Saturday, October 5, after the Father Brown episode and after my husband Charles returned from work, he and I saw a quite good Lifetime movie called The Girl Who Wasn’t Dead (2024), directed quite sensitively by Simone Stock from a script by Yuri Baranovsky and Angela Gulner. The film was supposedly “inspired” by a true story, though it also carried a this-is-fiction disclaimer. The central character is 15-year-old Erica Christine Bennett (Emma Tremblay), who’s being raised by her mother Carrie O’Brien (Lyndsy Fonseca, a familiar name to Lifetime viewers) – only while at her local high-school library in Novato, California (the story may be fictional but the locale really exists, and both Charles and I were startled by a real place name). Unfortunately, since Daniel Bennett (Paul du Toit), Erica’s dad, divorced her, Carrie has become far stricter as a disciplinarian – and when Daniel visits after a bit of passing dialogue mentions that he’s already involved with another woman and has fathered a baby with her, he chews her out for not being strict enough with Erica. Carrie replies, “I’ve made up so many rules for her I can’t remember them all myself!” Erica sees her escape from her mom in a 21-year-old man named Andrew Jensen (Kyle Clark), whom she met at the school library when they bonded in the stacks for a particularly popular young-adult science-fiction book series. They’ve started to date and even, it’s strongly hinted, have become intimate. When the film opens, the two lovebirds are hiding from Erica’s mom in a motel that otherwise looks like Hooker Central. When Erica sneaks out of the room because she’s hungry and wants to hit one of the vending machines for a snack, the motel manager upbraids her, thinks she’s a teenage runaway who’s become a prostitute and urges her to go home before it’s too late. She’s a runaway but she’s also very much in love with Andrew, but her little errand gets them reported to the cops.

Detective Richards (Bronwen Smith), a heavy-set, no-nonsense woman, arrives at the scene, arrests Andrew and holds him in jail overnight after giving him a warning that if he continues to see Erica, she’ll arrest him for statutory rape. Andrew tearfully breaks up with Erica the next day, but she’s still very much in love with him – much to the consternation of her long-time best friend, Liam Wilson (alas the imdb.com page does not give the name of the quite good actor playing him), who himself seems to have a crush on Erica, though both Charles and I wondered (especially after a chat he has in the high-school hallway with another male student) if he were supposed to be Gay. Liam jokingly calls Erica “bitch,” and after they go on a date at a bowling alley and she orders a huge amount of food and sticks him with the tab, he jokingly threatens her life. Alas, a heavy-set young man who works at the bowling alley reports this months later and briefly gets Liam in trouble with the cops as a suspect in Erica’s murder. Erica is able to lie low in Andrew’s house for three years – his parents raised him in Novato until they moved to Oregon when he was 12, but they kept their Novato home and “sold” it to him (presumably at a nominal price) when he turned 18, whereupon he moved back there and found a job doing deliveries for a local store called Hunter Electronics. But the cops become convinced that Erica is dead, murdered by a serial killer who’s been plaguing the local area and has already offed a teenage girl named Ana Martinez. Ana’s mother, Martina Martinez (Isa Sanchez), meets Carrie and offers her support, and the police give a press conference asking for information about Erica, Ana and two or three other young women who also disappeared mysteriously. Carrie’s church even holds a memorial service for Erica after the serial killer is caught and gives a laundry list of confessions, including to Erica’s “murder.”

Meanwhile, the real Erica is holed up in Andrew’s house, where she’s afraid to leave because she’s worried that if she’s found, Andrew will be arrested, until the announcement that someone else has been convicted and is about to be sentenced for her “murder.” She makes a dramatic courtroom appearance and announces to the world that she’s alive and therefore, whatever the defendant might have done to other girls, he shouldn’t be punished for killing her because she’s still very much alive. The cops swoop down on Andrew’s home and he is finally arrested, though he’s only sentenced for a year after it dawns on Carrie that Erica is still genuinely in love with this young man and therefore she drops most of her charges against him. Only public opinion in Novato runs strongly against Erica, and though she and Andrew reunite after he does his year in prison, they’re sued for the $110,000 the city spent looking for her during her disappearance and supposed “death.” Erica also loses the support of Liam and her brother Joey (played by Logan Pierce as a boy and Everett Anders as a young man). Charles thought the story was too predictable, but that was actually one of the things I liked about it; instead of ramping up the melodrama, writers Yuri Baranovsky and Angela Gulner carefully crafted a story in which there are no villains and there are no heroes, merely understandable and relatable human beings caught in an impossible situation and trying to make the best of it.

Charles also saw a parallel between it and Sir James M. Barrie’s play Mary Rose (1920), even though the young woman in Mary Rose disappears supernaturally. In both Mary Rose and The Girl Who Wasn’t Dead, a young woman disappears and then reappears and wonders why her family is so upset with her when she comes back. I remember being curious about Mary Rose for years because Alfred Hitchcock had seen the play in its initial run in London and for decades had wanted to make a movie of it – and though he didn’t get to film Mary Rose, there are elements of it in the plots of some of Hitchcock’s films, notably Vertigo and Marnie. When I first read Mary Rose, I thought of Barrie’s by far most famous play, Peter Pan, and conjectured that he was probably tired of people asking him, “But what about the parents of the Lost Boys – what did they go through?” So he wrote Mary Rose as an answer to that question. I quite liked The Girl Who Wasn’t Dead; it’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen on Lifetime, a far subtler and gentler story than we’re used to seeing on this channel, with genuinely complex and multidimensional characters and a refreshing absence of the usual melodramatic Lifetime tropes.