The Girl Who Got Away
Starring Lexi Johnson, Kaye Tuckerman, Chukwudi Iwuji
Writer-director Michael Morrissey
Rating: ** ½
This is a darker-than-darkest serial-killer thriller….Actually the serial killings have already happened when the film opens. So who is doing all the killing now?
It’s an adrenaline-pumping plot premise shot with an eye on disturbing satanic images of a demented woman Elizabeth (Kaye Tuckerman) who , circa the 1990s, captured and enslaved five girls(reminds me of the girls’ remand home in Muzaffarpur). Four of them were brutally murdered. The fifth escaped.
Or “gotten away”, if you will.And now Christina(Lexi)’s nemesis is looking for her….
It’s a chilling ominous premise, brought to a fair degree of diabolic fear by a director who knows how to squeeze every ounce of thrills out of a good hunter-prey pursuit drama. The scares are not scarce and the narrative boasts of a fair momentum whereby a sense of foreboding is constantly flashed in our eyes.
While the twists in the tale are often unpredictable some of the earlier gruesomeness could have been avoided. The bodies begin to pile up too quickly and suddenly, leaving us with a sense of been-there-done-them-all saturation. However the camera(Peter Mariuzza) is forever on the prowl. Not a moment goes by when we don’t fill a shivery unseen presence in the midst of the muddy murky mayhem.
In several vital ways,The Girl That Got Away is unlike any slasher thriller we have seen. It doesn’t give us the queasy comfort of knowing who the killer is. Halfway through , the moral equation begins to de-shape,bringing to a grinding halt all sense of justice being done .
What I like about the film is not so much the moral combat between the serial killer and the protagonist(who got away) but the survivor Christina’s determination to give her adoptive daughter a normal life. Tragically all the good intentions sewn into the plot are undone towards the end. We are finally left with no grips to cling on to as the slide downwards into oblivion begins.
Good performances, a gripping plot structure.But there is little here to reassure us that good finally overcomes evil.
