Girl in the Picture

In 1990 a badly injured woman is found on a road in Oklahoma and dies a few days later. Her name is Tonya Hughes. The husband who arranges the funeral soon takes her son and disappears. Then it emerges that her name was not Tonya. Then that she had attended high school as Sharon Marshall, and that the man she called her father was the same man who later became her husband. The subject is not the murder but a person's identity being erasable in full. Her real name was Suzanne Sevakis, and she was abducted by Franklin Floyd in 1975 while her mother was serving a short sentence. For fifteen years nobody noticed; she went to school, her teachers found her bright, and nobody asked a question. The form is arranged to place the viewer inside the investigation. Information arrives not chronologically but in the order it was learned; each section invalidates the one before, and the viewer is left behind exactly as the police were. The most uncomfortable element is the present-day testimony of her classmates and teachers: all of them say they sensed something was wrong and could not name what. Skye Borgman directs. It was released on Netflix in 2022. Who it is for: viewers interested in true crime documentary and questions of identity. Who it is not for: anyone unprepared for narratives involving child abuse; the warning is real.