Lost Girls - Cheap Thoughts

Well, the world may have stopped and cinemas may be closed down, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t new films being released that can be discussed and critiqued. Lost Girls is a crime drama that originally premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and was recently released onto Netflix. The film follows the story of Mari Gilbert (Amy Ryan) a working-class mother of three struggling to cope with the disappearance of her eldest daughter and the failures of the police investigation as a result.

The qualities of the film can be summed up quite neatly, it’s has a simple plot but with an important message behind it and represents through emotional and tragic characters. Mari is a struggling mother, she’s unable to provide them the financial or medical support needed to properly raise them, and this has lead to internalised conflict between the family members, yet when push comes to shove, Mari goes above and beyond to try and find justice for her missing daughter, unlike the justice system which failed all of them. The film is heavily critical of the police department that didn’t treat the crime with the severity or importance as they should, their lack of urgency or even interest in solving the situation forces this woman to do their job for them and results in a more hostile and bleak situation because of it.

Most of this is held together thanks to Amy Ryan’s performance which portrays a character blended between anger, fragility, love and exhaustion. Fused with Igor Martinovic’s camera and director Liz Garbus tells a truly drab and depression film but in exactly the right way needed for the picture. Though this does raise the question on if Netflix was the right choice to release the film. While streaming platforms have allowed for wider and easier releases for a plethora of independent films, they have also created somewhat of an identity of being the easy watches, the ones that you can sit down, relax and enjoy the next 90 minutes of your life. Lost Girls is anything but enjoyable, it’s smart, well-made and engaging, but certainly not easy, and unlikely to be a film to be watched more than once. Lost Girls doesn’t offer any easy answers, it doesn’t give much sense of catharsis, never even teases you with the possibility of hope, but merely closure and saying that will have to do because this is reality and sometimes that’s all you get.

So if you’re looking for something entertaining and uplifting during this time of global crisis, this is very much not the film for you, but if reality still hasn’t jaded you enough to make you angry and depressed constantly, then feel free to let this film finish you off.

-Danny