Girl Taken (CMW Springtime Productions, Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Yesterday evening (May 18) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called Girl Taken. Charles at first wondered if we’d seen it before, because the title is so generic and could apply to so many Lifetime movies it sounded like something we’d seen before even though we hadn’t. (Last night’s showing was advertised as a “Premiere.”) Girl Taken was directed by Paula Elle from a script by Mark Sanderson, and it’s basically your generic story about a disaffected teenage girl, Rose Morrell (Kennedy Rowe), who runs away from home the next morning after her 17th birthday party ended ignominiously. It seemed that during the party Rose got a call from her boyfriend Trevor Riley announcing not only that he isn’t coming to her party but he’s breaking up with her and doesn’t want to see her again. Rose’s mother Anita (Erica Durance), who’s raised Rose as a single parent since Rose’s dad was killed in a hit-and-run accident years before, never liked Trevor anyway and her reaction is basically “good riddance,” but Rose is sufficiently heartbroken that she abruptly calls a halt to the party, sends everyone home and hides out in her bedroom. Before we learn any of this we’re treated to some spectacular aerial shots of the countryside in Washington state (where Girl Taken is set) and a scene in which a weekend camper, who’s a “guest body finder” along the lines of Law and Order, stumbles on the corpse of a 50-something white man, and Sheriff Beresford and his deputy, a Black woman named Marla Henrique, start an investigation to find out who he was and what might have happened to him. The intersection of these plot lines occurs when Rose is hitchhiking along Ridgecrest Road in the Washington back country.

After stopping briefly at an establishment called Faith’s Diner, she’s spotted by a man named Perry Simpson (Eric Hicks), whom she trusts at first because he’s a family friend. Perry is sufficiently in touch with Anita Morrell he occasionally borrows tools from her to repair his trucks, and he was actually invited to Rose’s disastrous birthday party, though he never showed up. Having the principal villain be someone the avenging heroine actually knows and considers a friend was a major departure from Lifetime’s usual “stranger danger” formula, and Sanderson gives us a marvelously ironic sequence when Perry calls up Anita and asks to borrow her tools again while, of course unbeknownst to her, he’s actually holding her daughter Rose as a captive. Perry is holding Rose at his home, a largely abandoned farm in the middle of the Washington countryside, where he’s living with a partner, a visibly pregnant blonde woman named Dani (Tavia Cervi) who’s the most genuinely conflicted character in the story. Rose asked Perry to give her a ride to the town of Cross Creek where her ex-boyfriend Trevor lives – she wants to confront him and get him to tell her to her face why he broke up with her – but Perry takes a different route and drives her to his farm instead. There he and Dani offer her coffee, which Dani spikes with a knockout drug, and when Rose finally comes to nearly 24 hours later she awakes in a quite large bed with no idea where she is or what happened to her. One thing I liked about Sanderson’s script is he kept it ambiguous as to just what Perry’s motives are: when Rose asks him point-blank why he’s taken her, he answers noncommittally and says he wants her to be part of his family.

Sanderson also drops us some hints, including an old letter Rose stumbles on addressed to “Edward Teale” at the farm and Dani’s rather elliptical statement that she’s lived on the farm her whole life but has only known Perry for two years. It doesn’t take long to figure out that Edward Teale was the original owner of the farm and Perry killed him and took it over from him while intimidating Dani into a sexual relationship with him. Sanderson also drops hints that Perry has done this at least once before, only on that occasion the girl was just 14 and “didn’t work out” because she refused to follow Perry’s orders. At one point Dani offers to show Rose the one remaining animal on the farm, a horse, and I was thinking they’d have Rose steal the horse and ride home to her mother, who in the meantime has launched her own investigation and is determined to find her daughter. Instead Rose tries to escape more prosaically and Perry catches her and leaves her chained up in a secret basement underneath the farm’s barn, from which she tries to break out by striking her bonds with a brick she’s conveniently found. (Charles objected to this scene because the most likely outcome would be her breaking her wrists. He said she should have tried to break the chain off the beam to which its other end was attached.) It also turns out that sheriff’s deputy Marla Henrique takes the case unusually personally because a year or two previously her own daughter Olivia similarly disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Eventually Marla traces an unusual ring found on the finger of the mystery corpse and finds the jeweler who custom-made it. The ring was made for Edward Teale and sent to him by mail at the address of the farm Perry is now occupying.

Marla goes out to the farm and Perry tells her he is Edward Teale, but Marla looks up the driver’s license of the real Edward Teale, sees his ID photo, and realizes he’s a much older and heavier man than the one she talked to at the farm. It’s not surprising, therefore, when we learn later that Perry killed Teale and took over the farm, leaving his body to rot in the Washington hills until the weekend outdoorsman in the opening scene discovered it. It’s also not surprising that Dani is Teale’s daughter, whom Perry seduced and turned into his sex slave, though we never definitively learn whether Marla Henrique’s daughter Olivia was the mystery woman whom Perry kidnapped previously and then “disappeared.” Sanderson also gives us an action-filled climax with plenty of reversals of the kinds Lifetime writers so love. Marla drives out to Perry’s (stolen) farm determined to arrest him and find and rescue Rose, only just as she’s located the secret entrance to the sub-basement where Rose is chained up, Perry sneaks up behind her and clobbers her over the head. When Sheriff Beresford himself shows up as backup, Perry grabs a gun and shoots him in the shoulder. Fortunately, Rose’s mom Anita shows up at this point and takes out Perry from behind, and other people in the local constabulary soon arrive and take Perry and Dani into custody. Luckily Beresford and Marla survive Perry’s attacks on them, though Perry will still face murder charges for Edward Teale and the mystery girl he “disappeared” who may or may not have been Marla’s missing daughter Olivia (ya remember Marla’s missing daughter Olivia?) The film ends with a reconciliation between Rose and her mother Anita even though Anita laments that Rose is going off to college to study veterinary medicine in the fall after she graduates from high school, and that will leave Anita an “empty nester.” Though not at the quality summit of a few Lifetime movies, Girl Taken is a quite well done movie within the Lifetime formula, and Mark Sanderson deserves kudos not only for some artful variations on the Lifetime formula but also his refusal to ramp up the situations and the level of melodrama found in all too many other writers’ Lifetime scripts!