Vanished Out of Sight, a.k.a. Blind River (Anthem Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, January 4) I watched two Lifetime movies, now that Lifetime has abandoned their saccharine holiday programming and returned to their usual formula of what New York Times critic Maureen Dowd called “Pussies in Peril.” The Lifetime Web site didn’t list the movie they were showing at 8 p.m., but it turned out to be unexpectedly good. The credits on Lifetime’s version gave the title as Vanished Out of Sight, which imdb.com didn’t have a listing for, but it turned up under the alternate title Blind River. Both titles are references to this one’s pussy in peril, Claire Moyer (Annalise Basso), being literally blind. She’s living alone with her six-year-old daughter Briar (Avalon Reign) and dating a hot-looking Black man named Beck Harris (Tracy Campbell), who lives with his uncle Elijah (Leajato Amara Robinson). Beck proposes marriage to Claire and would like to move in together once they tie the knot, but Claire is reticent. When Briar disappears without an apparent trace and the sheriff’s deputies in Kosciusko County, Indiana ask Claire if she’s notified Briar’s father, Claire says, “She doesn’t have a father.” While this is biologically impossible, we at first take it to mean either that Claire’s father is dead or his relationship with Claire, such as it was, ended so badly Claire has literally written him out of Briar’s life. Claire was so neurotically overprotective of Briar, to the point of freaking out and forbidding her to ride the bike Beck gave her for Christmas (this takes place around the holidays) unless someone else is watching her the whole time. Periodically we see flashbacks to some really traumatic incident in Claire’s earlier life, as well as scenes between Claire and Briar before Briar disappeared. The police investigation into Briar’s disappearance is led by a Kosciusko County, Indiana sheriff’s deputy named Walker Donley (Steven Ogg) and includes Hooper Miller (Jay Huguley) and his mother, Reece Miller (Denise Smolarek), who live together as well as serving on the force, and also a young blond hunk who seems to hang around in the back. (The film was shot in the small town of Mentone, Indiana, where it takes place, rather than asking us to believe that Anywhere, Canada is really in the U.S.)

There’s also a grizzled old mountain man named Abel Wood (Wynn Reichert) whom we see several times carrying a hunting rifle he seems to be aiming to shoot at any passers-by who cross the line onto his property, as well as a hardware worker (Oliver Pettit) who had the misfortune to be on one of those lists of convicted sex offenders. The hardware guy is first targeted by the police as part of a “round up the usual suspects” reach-out to the three registered sex criminals who live in the neighborhood, but he becomes a real figure of pathos as well as a red herring. He’s living in a house inherited from his late father, and because it’s within 100 yards of a school the police order him to sell the place and move – and he doesn’t want to do that, not least because the house is in an acute state of disrepair and it will need more work than he can afford to bring it up to salable condition. Midway through the movie writer-director Carissa Stutzman – who does an excellent job in both tasks – lets us know that Claire’s relentless overprotectiveness of Briar has to do with her own status as a rape victim seven years earlier, and ultimately it dawns on us that Briar is the result of that rape. Stutzman also has Claire realize who her rapist was after all these years when he hears the sounds Hooper Miller makes around her house while he’s ostensibly investigating the case and recognizes them as those her rapist made. It turns out [spoiler alert!] that the real villain is Hooper’s mother Reece, who was well aware that Hooper was both Claire’s rapist and Briar’s father. Assigned by the Kosciusko County Sheriff’s Department to investigate the original rape, Reece talked Claire out of undergoing a rape kit and essentially buried the investigation to protect her son. Now, the thought of having Hooper’s daughter living with a Black stepfather hooks the Millers’ racism big-time and they determine to kidnap Briar and have Hooper raise her as his own so she won’t be calling a Black man “dad.”

They also hamper Claire’s own attempts to investigate the case by killing her service dog, Stevie; Claire later explains that she originally hired someone else to off the dog but when he bungled the job, she did it herself. And Claire doesn’t do her cause any favors when she goes out and stands on a bridge over the town’s river and accidentally drops her cell phone in the water, thereby losing the ability to get in touch with anyone when she gets in trouble. What’s more, when Beck also disappears, the police put out an all-points bulletin treating him as an armed and dangerous fugitive – he’s really been beaten within an inch of his life by the Millers, mère et fils, and left to die in their house, though Claire has managed to drag him outside and bury his body under leaves. We don’t know for sure whether Beck is alive or dead until the tag scene, which shows him, Claire and Briar as one big happy family after the traumatic events of the film. What makes Vanished Out of Sight a.k.a. Blind River especially good for a Lifetime film (in fact, especially good, period) is writer-director Stutzman’s creative use of the various elements of film, especially sound. Working from the premise that blind people often become hyperacute in their other senses to make up for their lack of sight, Stutzman and her sound mixer, Joseph Vnuck, work quite creatively and heighten sounds that are usually just background noises so we get an idea of how Claire perceives the world. There’s also a scene in which she reacts to a flashlight shone straight into her face, which suggests that she’s not totally blind and can at least see bright lights. Stutzman also gets a great performance from Annalise Basso, who’s totally convincing as a blind person; I’ve seen major stars playing disabled people less believably than this. Vanished Out of Sight is one of the occasional gems Lifetime gives us, a welcome respite from their usual formulae and a legitimate extension of their “pussies in peril” approach. Stutzman even gives us a shot of Hooper Miller at the end holding his daughter and clutching her that suggests he has genuine affection for her and isn’t just a stick-figure villain. Carissa Stutzman is clearly a major filmmaker and I hope she gets some opportunities for the feature-film assignments she definitely deserves.