While Hollywood has too often treated sex workers on screen as disposable victims whose violent deaths are portrayed as more interesting than their lives, a new Netflix feature film is winning praise for taking the opposite approach—exploring the lives, families and humanity of the escorts who fell victim to a still-unknown serial killer on Long Island, New York, in 2010 and 2011.
The film, Lost Girls, debuts Friday on the popular streaming service, and stars Amy Ryan (The Wire, The Office) as Mari Gilbert, the mother of Shannan Gilbert, who disappeared in May of 2010. But Shannan’s body was not discovered for another year—and then primarily because Mari Gilbert relentlessly pushed the police to search the area where her daughter disappeared.
When they did, the police found 10 bodies of women, most of them also identified as sex workers. Police came to believe that the women were all victims of the same killer, who preyed on sex workers, and who may have been operating on Long Island for up to 20 years.
Mari Gilbert accused the cops of failing to take her daughter’s murder, and the murders of the other women, seriously simply because of what they did to earn a living. And in fact, a detective on the case was quoted saying that it was a “consolation” that the serial killer did not appear to be “selecting citizens at large.”
But though Lost Girls—based on the the 2013 book Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by investigative journalist Robert Kolker—is at least ostensibly the latest entry in Netflix’ “true crime” genre, New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis, who called the film “bracing,” lauded director Liz Garbus’s work for turning that genre’s conventions upside down.
“It humanizes women often represented as disposable, more props than people. When a mother in the movie laments that her missing daughter, a sex worker, has been forgotten along with other women, her words feel like an accusation,” Dargis wrote. “When ‘our girls’ are remembered, she says, it’s never as ‘friend, sister, mother, daughter.’”
Garbus has been nominated for four Academy Awards—but all for her work in documentaries, including 1998’s The Farm: Angola, USA and What Happened, Miss Simone in 2016. But Lost Girls is her first dramatic feature.
“You couldn’t tell this story in the same way through a documentary,” Garbus told the site Decider, “because these scenes had already been lived.”
Photo By Netflix
