Liz Garbus’ “Lost Girls” shares a subtitle with the Robert Kolker book it’s based on: “An Unsolved American Mystery.” The mystery in question is that of the Long Island serial killer, who murdered at least ten women— many of them sex workers —over some twenty years, near the South Shore of Long Island. Based on Garbus’ filmography, which includes the Oscar-nominated documentaries “What Happened, Miss Simone?” and “The Farm: Angola, U.S.A,” you might assume this is yet another Netflix-bound true crime doc. But “Lost Girls” marks her narrative debut, though it’s tough to say whether that format is a better fit for this story.
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There are, to be certain, some advantages. One is the lead performance of Amy Ryan, top-notch as Mari Gilbert — mother of Shannon, whose disappearance sets the investigation in motion. Raising two more daughters and exhausting herself at two jobs, Mari is a working-class mom who leans on adult Shannon for financial help, making vague promises like “I’ll pay you back, just as soon as I get on the other side of this shit.” One night, Shannon doesn’t show up for a planned dinner, which isn’t all that unusual. But when they can’t get ahold of her the next day, Mari and her girls start to worry.
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Garbus’ direction in these early scenes is subtle but effective, casting a spell of slowly increasing dread, keying in on the way the worst presumptions and fears can crawl into our heads, and fester there. When the cops are indifferent, Mari ends up playing amateur detective, following leads and interrogating suspects with steadily mounting righteous anger. And then four skeletons turn up off the parkway, bringing four more sets of relatives into the story, and allowing Mari to turn up the pressure. “It’s our job,” she announces, “as mothers and sisters, to make sure they’re not forgotten.”
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Ryan’s work here is something of a bookend performance to “Gone Baby Gone,” and not just because she’s another working-class mother of a missing child; both characters are simultaneously deeply flawed and deeply sympathetic, their considerable shortcomings excused, in many ways, by their understandable desperation and concern. A sympathetic cop (Gabriel Byrne) assures her, “This isn’t on you,” and her response is immediate: “I’m her mother. It’s all on me.”
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Byrne is but one of the many fine characters actors who fill out Garbus’ cast; we also have stellar turns from Lola Kirke, Kevin Corrigan, Reed Birney, and “JoJo Rabbit” stand-out Thomasin McKenzie. The only false notes come from Dean Winters (aka Dennis from “30 Rock,” aka “Mayhem” from those insurance ads), who is just a little too inherently comic to buy as a bad cop in a serious drama (especially when he’s turned up so often as a bad cop on “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”).
As expected from such an accomplished documentarian, Garbus establishes a clear sense of time (early 2010s) and place. She captures the look and feel of Long Island, Jersey City, and other areas on the other side of the bridges and tunnels, as well as the geographically universal yet uniquely creepy vibe of insulated communities (“Around here, we help people!” insists one suspect, unsettlingly).
Yet for all the impressive craft, sense of harrowing anxiety and searing performances on display, “Lost Girls” doesn’t seem to know how to wrap things up and it hurts the picture overall. Ryan’s Mari asks important, pointed questions about why the police failed their girls, but then Garbus does one of those unfortunate “cut to the real people” conclusions, followed by closing text that tells, with frustrating brevity, another related, and perhaps equally fascinating story. If this were a true-crime docu-series, we’d have time for that and more— and, that format being what it is, the unsolved status of the crime might not feel so unsatisfying. (Yes, we were warned, right at the beginning. But still.) “Lost Girls” will make its way to Netflix in March, and that’s a home that makes sense for it— it feels a lot like one of those “based on a true story” made-for-HBO movies from the 1990s, crafted by competent filmmakers with respectable casts. So this description is meant as a compliment. Mostly. [B-]
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