THE GIRL WHO WASN'T MISSING

THE GIRL WHO WASN'T MISSING

This 2011 film from Shane Ryan, the auteur behind such titles as AMATEUR PORN STAR KILLER and MY NAME IS A BY ANONYMOUS, is actually a significantly re-edited version of his earlier (2009) effort, WARNING! PEDOPHILE RELEASED.

It opens with Hispanic-looking 15-year-old Echo (Kai Lanette) whiling away her afternoon kicking empty bottles across wasteland, tossing around a discarded shopping trolley and the like. Lost in the music fed to her through her headphones, her time is wilfully aimless.

Alas, she strays too far and this rather innocuous opening footage is curtailed by shocking glimpses of her subsequent gang-rape. Committed in broad daylight and outdoors, at least three men are seen (from their waists down only) taking turns at deflowering the demure girl. She's left sobbing, sitting in a pool of her own blood.

As harrowing as this event clearly is for the girl, she struggles on home and attempts to put the ordeal behind her. However, "A Short While Later" - as the onscreen text informs us - Echo finds herself spontaneously vomiting while on her walk home from school. Fearing the worst, she rushes to the nearest convenience store and purchases a pregnancy testing kit. Sure enough, the news is bad...

The news gets even worse, in fact, when her father (Rob Dale) discovers the abandoned kit in a bin at home. He promptly kicks Echo out of the house, forcing her to leave with just a few items of clothing, her headphones and beloved guitar.

For a while she manages to survive by ringing old pals and even her grandpa, looking for floors to bunk down on overnight. But those kinds of favours soon dry up and before long Echo is resigned to kipping under bridges or in disused rail carriages.

The text then tells us "A Year Or So Passes By". Echo is still homeless. There is no baby. Predictably, distressingly, she is now more clued-up about life on the streets, and spreading her legs to strangers in return for small sums of cash has become the norm. Perhaps the drugs she's started using too are a coping mechanism...

Re-cut to entirely remove the paedophile character from the original story, Ryan's film now tells the tale of a disenfranchised teenage girl kicked out of her home and embarking on a gradual, painfully plausible decline into prostitution. There's nothing sensational or titillating about what we see: this is a grim reality, harsh and unsparing.

The film itself is often paradoxically attractive, boasting impressive handheld digital photography and great use of barren, run-down locations. It's often very arty despite occasionally deliberate lo-fi aesthetic values. There are a couple of scenes where Lanette sits on a settee in the middle of an otherwise desolate landscape, for example, which are simple but quite extraordinary.

Special mention must go to the score too, which in itself is a major character of the film. You see, Ryan's film is more concerned with mood than narrative - though the simple story is a well-traversed one, of course - and the music plays to this ideal tremendously. Although used sparsely - there are a lot of lengthy, pensive silence throughout - the music employed is eclectic (Eastern choruses; alt-pop laziness; dance beats; sombre piano strains etc) and often genuinely stirring.

I enjoyed the fact that there was so little dialogue in the film. Whether this was a conceptual decision (reflecting the awkwardness of teenaged communication, an uncaring world, etc) I don't know, but the many scenes of simply expressive visuals worked well. It's 17 minutes before the first line of dialogue is spoken, and 21 minutes before Echo speaks - in a 70-minute film! But the silence adds to the melancholic twist on the sunny California settings.

Abrupt edits are effectively jarring; nudity is frank but never exploitative. Stylistically the film looks and feels very similar to the aforementioned MY NAME IS A BY ANONYMOUS. Events dip into monochrome occasionally; Lanette's anchoring performance is heartbreakingly true; everything is deliberately paced for maximum effect.

Still unreleased to date, Shane Ryan's THE GIRL WHO WASN'T MISSING - a telling title which could depressingly relate to any number of misunderstood, alienated youths kicked out onto the streets in recent years - deserves to be seen more widely.

Review by Stuart Willis


 
Directed by Shane Ryan
Not Rated
Back