The Girl Who Got Away features twists and turns that only after its shocking ending will audiences begin to understand.
Released in 2021, this horror thriller tells the story of a mid-30's woman, Christina Bowden, whose past comes back to haunt her after the serial killer that had her held captive as a child breaks free of prison.
It stars Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Peacemaker actor Chukwdi Iwuji and This Is Us' Lexi Johnson, in a winding tale that fans of this year's Longlegs will find eerily familiar.
The Girl Who Got Away Plot Explained
The Girl Who Got Away centers on Lexi Johnson's Christina Bowden, a 30-something woman living in small-town New York who comes from a haunted past.
Her life is flipped upside down, however, as police officer Jamie Nwosu (played by Chukwdi Iwuji) comes to tell her that something terrifying from her childhood has come back into her life.
The Girl On The Road
The movie opens with a father and son driving down the road on a late-night drive back to town. Along the way the pair see a bloodied woman chasing after a young girl along the highway.
Grabbing hold of the girl and disposing of the elderly woman, the father and son hand the youngster off to the police and allow her pursuer to be arrested and taken into prison.
The movie then jumps about 20 years, introducing audiences to Christina Bowden, a teacher working in Enessa, New York who wants nothing more than to be the mother of a daughter.
As audiences meet Christina, she is in the middle of the process of adopting a young girl named Lisa, who has lived her life up to that point bouncing from foster home to foster home.
Christina is giving pending guardianship of the 13-year-old, on the condition that that she passes state checks following several days/weeks of living as a mother and daughter.
This is when things start to turn upside down. At a party where Christina was planning on introducing Lisa as her daughter for the first time, Chukwudi Iwuji's Officer Jamie comes knocking on the door.
He tells Christina that the woman who had once murdered her mother and kidnapped her, Elizabeth Caulfield, has broken out of jail, and is now on the loose.
This is when audiences learn that the little girl from the beginning of the movie was, in fact, Christina, and she was just one of five young girls to have been held captive by Caulfield, with Christina being the only one to make it out of her clutches alive.
Deaths Close to Christina
With Elizabeth Caulfield on the loose, Officer Jamie thinks it best to have Christina under his watchful eye at all hours possible. This sees Christina forced to abandon her new daughter, Lisa, leaving her with the foster family Christina grew up in, so she can focus on her safety.
As Jamie tries to keep watch of Christina, as best he can with the limited resources he has, he also begins investigating the history of the Caulfield crimes in hopes of uncovering something that could help him crack this case.
This leads him to former Police Chief Gerry Bailey. It turns out, Bailey has a history with Jamie, as his now very pregnant daughter, Amy, once dated Iwuji's character before the pair were seemingly forced by her parents.
What Jamie does not see on his visit to the house is a secret room in Bailey's basement where he is watching these off-putting confessional-type videotapes of young girls quoting the bible.
He does not learn much from Bailey, other than that he MUST capture her, no matter what.
Around this time, some mysterious killings begin to happen around Enessa. First, it is Christina's ex-boyfriend, Tom, the foster parents she had left Lisa with near the start of the movie, the teenage boy Christina caught Lisa snogging several days earlier, and then ultimately Lisa herself.
Each successive killing makes Jamie more and more uneasy around Christina, thinking how could someone who had been in jail all these years know about all these minute details of Chrstina's life?
When asked about this, Christina tells Jamie that she had been mailing letters back to Elizabeth in prison since she was 15. He justifies this, saying that the serial killer was the only real mother she ever had, and that is why she felt the need to keep in communication with her.
Elsewhere on his investigation, Jamie discovers some videotapes of his own. Sorting through some evidence files, Jamie comes across some tapes, taking them to a local expert to hopefully discern something from them.
The tapes seem like they might be a dead-end, given their age and degradation, so, at least for now, Jamie looks elsewhere.
This leads him to the Enessa Hospital, where Elizabeth Caulfield had once worked as a maternity nurse. It turns out that Elizabeth had been peculiarly fired before she went on her murderous spree 20 years ago.
According to the longtime nurse Jamie chats within the Hospital records room, Caulfield was a great nurse, but word came down from pretty powerful people saying she needed to go. This is when it is revealed that Caulfield previously had an affair with former Police Chief Gerry Bailey (gasp!).
That's Not My Name
This all comes to a head in The Girl Who Got Away's last act. Jamie is now questioning if retired Officer Bailey is feeding Caulfield information resulting in the murders surrounding Christina, or if it is Christina herself enacting these killings (whether she is conscious of it or not).
Christina had come back to her home after finding Lisa dead and gone in a bout of untethered rage. Taking an axe to various possessions around her house and screaming wildly, the child services agent seen earlier in the movie stops by for his state visit.
He is shocked at some of his findings surrounding Christina. She had been untruthful with him, covering up an assault charge from her college days, where she beat her roommate to near death with a broomstick.
While Christina denies being cognizant during the attack, she tells the agent, "That is not my name" when he calls her Christina.
The movie then cuts back to Jamie, as she gets a call from his videotape expert saying she had cleaned up the video enough and found something. He arrives to find that the video is from mere days before Christina was found by the side of the road, and there was another girl there.
This means Christina had been hiding the existence of a sixth girl that was being held by Caulfield, leaving Jamie to further question what Christina has and has not been truthful about.
Because of this, he decides to confront Christina once and for all. He arrives at her house house to find her unraveling. She is digging a hole in the backyard where she had been seen clawing at what looked to be dreams at several points in the film so far.
It looks as though Christina has killed the child services agent, so Jamie finally says he has to take her in. He then reveals he knows about the sixth girl, to which Christina explains, that yes, there was another child in the house she was held in as a kid.
This girl was the biological daughter of Elizabeth and Police Chief Bailey named Katie. Through this moment and a series of flashbacks, it then becomes unclear whether Christina is, in fact, who she says she is, or is this newly-revealed sixth girl all grown up.
A Blood-Soaked Finale
With Christina in custody, Jamie receives a call from Amy, who is not trapped in her parents' home with an intruder having broken in and killed both her mom and dad.
This is confusing for Jamie, as he had thought he finally caught the killer in Christina, but that does not seem to be the case.
Jamie arrives at the Bailey home to find Amy splayed out on the bathroom floor covered in blood. Someone, who is assumed to be Elizabeth Caulfield, had come in and cut her baby right out from her womb and was still lurking somewhere in the house.
As Jamie tries to stop Amy's bleeding, Christina emerges from the police car parked out front. It is time she put an end to this, and finally confront Elizabeth face to face.
Christina comes into the house to find blood everywhere and a newborn baby wrapped up in cloth sitting on the dining room table. She approaches the infant calling for Elizabeth to show herself.
The serial killer finally steps out from the shadow, telling Christina she finally can be the mother she has always told her she wanted to be.
Christina then drives a knife deep into Elizabeth's chest, killing the serial killer, and tying up that one last loose end from her past. The movie then closes with Christina holding the baby outside the house while being attended to by medical personnel.
In one last final twist, a paramedic comes over to Christina asking for her name, only for her to say, "I'm Katie," revealing she was the biological daughter of Elizabeth and Police Cheif Bailey, and Christina was in actuality the sixth dead girl Elizabeth had been seen burying in several flashbacks throughout the movie.
This leaves it unclear how much of a part Chrstina (or Katie) had in the recent killings in Enessa, but she looks to have finally gotten what she and her mother had always wanted, a pure, unimpeded relationship between mother and daughter.
The Girl Who Got Away is now streaming on Tubi.
