“Lost Girls,” the most prominent cinematic take on the Gilgo murders, announces exactly what it will be in its opening seconds: a shot of a silhouetted Shannan Gilbert running frantically, followed shortly by a title card that says: “An unsolved American mystery.”
It’s an immediate way to prepare Netflix audiences (the movie starts streaming on Friday) for a reality Long Islanders already know — that more than nine years after the first remains were found in the area, police have not made an arrest over the 10 remains found there — and it’s also a tool for director Liz Garbus, a renowned documentarian (“What Happened, Miss Simone?”) making her narrative feature filmmaking debut, to prepare audiences for the reality that “Lost Girls” has no catharsis to offer.
“One of the big attractions of this film is that it’s not a typical mystery thriller whodunit where we’re following clues that the police find, and then we’re going to catch the serial killer and learn about him,” says star Amy Ryan (Oscar-nominated for 2007’s “Gone Baby Gone,” “The Office,” “Birdman”).
Ryan plays Mari Gilbert, Shannan’s mother, who spearheaded a public pressure campaign after her daughter went missing in May 2010 and became a face of the push for justice in the Gilgo murders, before she was killed by her schizophrenic daughter Sarra in 2016.
“It takes a sharp turn very quickly in the film where we start to bring back some humanity and dignity to the victims,” Ryan says. “And that’s driven by the character I play … who is the one to point out that when this case is talked about on the news, they’re always talking about ‘him,’ but let’s make sure the girls are never forgotten and also to call them by what they are — mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, as opposed to hookers (and) prostitutes.”
The key to finding the dramatic center of the movie, which features a script by Michael Werwie based on the 2013 book “Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery” by Robert Kolker, lies in Mari building relationships with the family members of other victims, Garbus says.
“What I found in the material was … the power of the connection with the women,” she says. “The closure that was available to them was these new bonds.”
The movie is defined by Mari’s fury at what she perceives to be inaction and indifference by the police and her belief that the case might have been investigated more urgently had the victims come from a different socioeconomic class.
“Mari says it in the movie: ‘If this had been a little blonder, a little younger and a little richer, this would be JonBenet (Ramsey) all over again,'” Garbus says. “But it’s the fact that these women had chosen to make a living by being sex workers — and of course they were many other things at the same time, some were mothers, some were students, some had other jobs — but they were seen as disposable people.”
The filmmaker says she believes the movie has the power to continue to fight that perception and to drive the narrative on this case. She says the increased public pressure that can come from a prominent movie on a platform like Netflix might serve as a powerful motivating force in solving it.
Garbus points to the Suffolk County Police Department’s news conference in January seeking help from the public to identify a belt believed to have been handled by a potential suspect as evidence of the impact the film might have, which occurred on the same day as the release of the movie’s trailer.
“The fact that they did their first press conference in many years the day that our trailer was released is telling of the power of media, and following in the footsteps of Mari Gilbert, who understood the power of the news and telling her story directly, not allowing the police to be the ones controlling the narrative,” Garbus says.
“Hopefully we’re following in her footsteps and continuing to tell the story and that discussion and pressure — look, that belt buckle, who knows how meaningful that is or isn’t, but if a lot of people watch this movie and a lot of people Google the case, maybe more people will get their eyes on that belt buckle, and then we have a better chance,” she adds.
Suffolk County Police contested the notion that the film, or any other form of media, has a tangible impact on the timeline of the investigation or the urgency applied to it.
“Our decisions to release information on cases are based on what is best to advance an investigation,” police said in a statement. “We do not make investigative decisions based on the actions of members of the media.”
