What would you do if your child committed murder? It’s a heavy question, isn’t it? A lot of people might not want to even contemplate it, let alone hear the words, either because they’re not certain of how they would answer or it’s just a question that they don’t want to consider. That’s fair, to be honest since popping questions like this isn’t something that a lot of people have to deal with on a regular basis. But in this particular movie on Amazon Prime, two parents that have gone through a divorce, Jay, and Rebecca, have to contend with the idea that their daughter has killed one of her friends by ‘accidentally’ pushing her off a bridge into an icy stream, killing her and losing her body to the current. The events leading up to the moment are fairly mundane as the movie starts off showing family videos of Kayla and her parents as she grows up and how much fun they have when she’s still young. But when the movie actually begins it shows Kayla in the backseat, on her way to a ballet retreat that she really doesn’t want to go on, with her mother and stepfather in the front seat.
The look that Kayla gives her mother and stepfather as they kiss each other goodbye (the stepfather is leaving on a trip) is kind of telling since if anyone’s ever been around an individual whose parents have divorced and found someone else, they might have seen such a look. That longing, long-suffering look that says the kid wishes that her parents were still together is hard to miss. But the thing about this is that quite a few kids that have been through the process of divorce might actually like one of the individuals that their parents have picked. In this case, Kayla doesn’t like his father’s choice of women either, as she simply wants her parents to get back together.
On the way to the ballet retreat with her father, she notices her friend, Brittany, standing at a bus stop on a lonely road waiting for a ride to the same retreat. Convincing her father to pick her up, the two engage in a conversation that becomes a bit hostile as Brittany appears to be hitting on Kayla’s father, which appears to make Kayla a bit angry. When Jay stops the car so that the girls can find a place to relieve themselves, he eventually has to go in search of them and ends up hearing a scream as he goes rushing to save his daughter. When he finds out that Kayla pushed Brittany over a bridge, he frantically tries to find Brittany, but from the look of the current, it would appear that there’s nothing that can be done. When it’s established that Kayla did this on purpose and that she has no remorse, Jay and Rebecca do their best to hide the incident, claiming that Kayla isn’t feeling well, even when Brittany’s father Sam comes looking for her. Throughout the course of the movie, Rebecca and Jay grow closer and closer as they try their best to find ways to save their daughter from going to jail. But when Sam finds a way to confront Kayla they take drastic measures and, using Brittany’s phone, which Jay found by the stream, try to implicate Sam in her murder.
The thing about this is that Jay and Rebecca are not murderers, they don’t have ice water in their veins, and they certainly don’t have what it takes to keep up the charade for long. As the cops are eventually clued into what’s been going on, the whole story kind of hits a sudden and grinding stop when, after running down Sam with her car, Rebecca and Jay are in the middle of cleaning his blood off the grill when Brittany shows up looking for Kayla. One might think that Brittany would be mad, vengeful, and ready to burn the house down, but instead, she’s whole, lively, and suddenly spills the whole plan that she and Kayla came up with, which was to make it look as though Kayla had killed her so that Brittany could spend time with her boyfriend.
Caught in the lie, Kayla has to confess to her parents that she did this to bring them closer together, as they were when she was still a little girl. As she admits to the plan, Kayla breaks down crying, and her distraught parents’ only reaction is to hold her tightly as police sirens can be heard outside, and the knocking on the door accompanied by the doorbell announces the fate that Jay and Rebecca knew was coming, even if they didn’t know it was all a lie. That’s why the question of ‘what would you do’ is so important. A lot of parents would be stripped, gutted, and emotionally dead after such a moment.
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