Without a Trace

Susan Selky is a literature teacher living in Brooklyn with her small son. One afternoon the boy does not come home from school. The police are called, a search starts, the neighbourhood turns out. As the days pass everyone begins to accept the worst; Susan does not. Once she is the only person who wants the search to continue, the people around her start turning on her. Stanley R. Jaffe directed the film from Beth Gutcheon's novel, which she adapted herself. The novel was drawn from the case of Etan Patz, who disappeared in New York in 1979. Kate Nelligan plays the mother and Judd Hirsch the detective running the investigation. The telling does not manufacture suspense; it is less about the missing child than about how the mother left behind is isolated.