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According to Robert Scucci
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Watching psychological horror movies is always a great experience for me, as genre conventions often limit the storytelling in painfully obvious ways. After watching hundreds of movies that prominently feature an unreliable protagonist with a troubled past that leads to questionable current behavior, I keep going back and looking for movies like The girl who ran away. While this film starts to make you question what’s real versus what its main character imagines, it’s very clear that sometimes you need to take things in stride, despite the build-up that would have you think otherwise.
that means The girl who ran away it sets up its premise and makes you question its chain of events, but only before it all comes back full circle with a third-act payoff that doesn’t feel like a total flop.
The girl who ran away
The girl who ran away lays all its cards on the table in its opening sequence, set in 1998, as a man and his boy drive down a dark country road. When the father saw the woman covered in blood and brandishing a knife, he stopped to see how he could help and got his son to leave the door locked. When a little girl bangs on the car window, the boy lets her in and discovers that she is a missing girl named Christina Bowden (played by Victoria Semenenko in this sequence), who escaped from the captivity of serial killer Elizabeth Caulfield (Kaye Tuckerman).
In the present, Christina (Lexi Johnson) has grown up and works as an elementary school teacher. Realizing that she would have no chance of making it to adulthood without someone to take her in after her escape, Christina adopts Lisa Spencer (Willow McCarthy), a troubled teenager who reminds her of herself in an attempt to make peace with her. own violent past. While Christina is living a normal life to the best of her ability, her world is shaken when police officer Jamie Nwosou (Chukwudi Iwuji) tracks her down to let her know that Elizabeth Caulfield has escaped from prison and seems determined to finish what she started. many years ago.
Safe house and body count
The titular runaway girl is hiding under Jamie’s watch, but she wants to stay away so no one worries about her health. Constantly looking over her shoulder, Christina becomes legitimately paranoid as her past haunts her, but not without experiencing blackout episodes where she wakes up with blood and dirt on her hands, making you question her innocence. While I’ve never doubted Christina’s innocence, it’s hard to ignore the fact that death follows her wherever she goes, as if she’s hiding some deep, dark, buried secret that she doesn’t want to be. uncovered.
A surprising turn of events
The overview mentioned above The girl who ran away it sounds like the rest of his run will result in something as contrived as Christina being the killer all along and framing Elizabeth for crimes she actually committed as a child. Without spoiling the plot, I can assure you that you will experience a twist that is beyond what you would expect in your average. psychological horror film.
Is Christina troubled to the point of being an unreliable witness in several cases? Absolutely.
But is she deliberately hiding incriminating evidence to the point that she is rightfully considered the main person of interest in the recent murders surrounding her?
This is where things get messy in the narrative.
I found myself changing my mind about a dozen times while watching The girl who ran away because he does something different than his contemporaries in that we not only see events unfold from Christina’s questionable perspective; The supporting characters have a degree of objectivity that is ambiguous yet telling as the mystery is pieced together and the authorities try to track down Elizabeth Caulfield.
It twists and turns a lot
Are we dealing with a psychotic serial killer who used his youth and innocence to trap his supposed captor, who is now out for revenge? Or are we dealing with a deeply traumatized and troubled woman whose memory of her own past shatters when she discovers that her life is in danger after years of repressing her childhood?
If you want answers to these questions, you can stream The girl who ran away free on Tubi.
