‘We’re all just a beat away from a bad choice’: Carlee Russell kidnapping hoax becomes a viral film
When Carlee Russell “disappeared” on the evening of 13 July, the matter was treated with a seriousness that is rarely extended to cases of missing Black women and girls.
Pictures of the 26-year-old proliferated on social media, and police in her Hoover, Alabama, hometown launched a statewide dragnet. But as the circumstances of Russell’s disappearance became more clear, the established narrative quickly unraveled.
The first bombshell revelation was that Russell, just before going missing, had placed a 911 call saying she’d seen a toddler trundling alone down an interstate shoulder – a report seemingly ripped from a classic Dave Chappelle standup routine. Then Russell called her brother’s girlfriend, who allegedly heard Russell express concern for someone and then let out a scream before dropping off the still-open line.
Two days later, Russell resurfaced with a different story: she told police she had been snatched by a man with orange hair who “came out of the trees” and bundled her into a semitrailer with another woman and a baby. Somehow, she escaped, only to be recaptured and forced to disrobe for photographs. Finally, after she was stuffed into another car and abandoned, Russell said, she freed herself and slipped into a wood, emerging at her parents’ house.
Russell’s cinematic flair enraptured the millions following her case in real time. Investigators sprinkled in their own details: that Russell had researched the film Taken and instructions on Amber alerts, that she had left her Mercedes idling on the roadside with her purse and a wig still inside, that she stopped at Target to stock up on Cheez-Its before checking into a Red Roof Inn.
Alvin Gray, a 37-year-old indie filmmaker based in Baltimore, found himself on a surprisingly emotional journey. “I went to bed that night with a heavy heart,” he remembers of those first fraught hours after Russell fell off the radar. “I have a habit of putting myself in the shoes of people who are in danger because I want to feel what they’re feeling for whatever weird storytelling reason.”
But within hours the genuine concern for Russell turned into anger; she admitted her abduction had been a hoax. Conservative cynics gleefully dismissed her as a female Jussie Smollett who wasted police resources and the goodwill of a nation.
This month, a municipal judge recommended she spend a year in jail and pay $18,000 in fines and restitution. Russell can appeal this punishment at the circuit court level, but she might struggle to find sympathy on a jury of her peers. Black people in particular still harbor wounded feelings and sum up the whole saga as a selfish, cloutchasing ploy that will surely make it even harder for another case of a missing Black person to be treated gravely.
Meanwhile, Gray wondered: what was her motivation?“When I first pictured the story, I’m like, man, this is a freakin’ thriller, a scary movie,” he says. “You’re going from being concerned and not knowing what’s happening to relieved that she’s safe but wondering: are these people still out there? And then right as you’re as far out on the edge as can be, you find out it was all a lie? That’s when I said: this is a parody. Someone should make this.”
So he did. Last monthhe released The Nurse That Saw the Baby on the Highway, the kind of buzzy insurgent production once sold on subway platforms and out of car trunks; now it’s available to rent on Prime Video. “I was thinking about movies like Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood” is how Gray explains his overly long title. Which is to say it fits snugly within the robust tradition of Black auteurs exploring real-life traumas through horror and comedy works. Nurse, though, unspools less like the fictional Get Out than like a live-action version of those old Taiwanese news animations, heightening a story that already strains credulity.
The film doesn’t shy away from the lowest-hanging fruit over its 49minute runtime, starting with the Russell character, Marlee, devouring the movie Taken and a box of Cheez-Its. (Marlee’s snacking is a delicious running gag.) But it’s how Gray uses these and more colorful strokes in Russell’s story to depict a character facing a nervous breakdown that elevates his film beyond parody into the realm of Hitchcock – whom he even quotes. Gray shows a deft hand while sending up the love story between Russell and her ex Thomar Simmons, a foil the public came to see as the true target of Russell’s stunt; while Marlee acts out of a seemingly desperate sense of lovesickness, relationship advice from Steve Harvey, the Family Feud host, plays on her car radio.
Gray, while sensitive to Russell’s plight, was intentional about not making a movie that piled on. “The motive wasn’t to poke fun at anyone,” he says. “It was to tell the story that was there.” What’s more, after the original story had taken so many on a breakneck ride in such a small space of time, Gray figured those who’d experienced that national stress test were ready to exhale.
Still: it wasn’t until his wife, Reena Ranae, a travel nurse, told him about her profession’s charged reactions to Russell, a nursing student passing herself off as the genuine article, that Gray decided heshould be the one to make the Russell film. And then Ranaedecided sheshould be the one to play the lead, despite never having acted before. Everyone else in the cast came from a social media all-call.
Inspired to direct after working as an extra for a season on the Wire, Gray turned the film project into a family affair, assuming the role opposite Ranae as Mike, the Simmons standin. (The opening sex scene probably had his parents and in-laws looking away.) Shooting scenes between their home and Ranae’s medical spa, Gray reckons he spent about $500 altogether on the production, much of that going toward a one-night Red Roof Inn rental. Over the course of four days, Gray says, the couple “quietly” shot the film with their three young children, including a month-old boy who briefly appears, at arm’s length. “It was challenging,” he adds, “but I wanted to get this done quick, while it was still a trending thing.”
Quite organically, the film wound up making its way from the odd Facebook post on to the Shade Room, Hollywood Unlocked and other Black pop culture outlets. While serious filmgoers weren’t inclined to give Nurse much more than a two-star review, casual watchers who went into it looking for a bit of weekend fun found their expectations thoroughly met. The film played especially well on TikTok, where clips and reviews were met with crylaughing emojis. “She had strippers and babies and the police,” noted one reviewer. “I love this though. I love when we just aren’t serious about anything.”
In the meantime, he’s busy working on a sequel, The Nurse That Saw the Baby on the Highway and Returns – a meta-response that follows Marlee as she forges through the fallout from the incident. “I’m gonna shoot the movie again with the Marlee character finding out that someone made a movie about her,” says Gray, fully prepared to defend his film to critics who might think it in poor taste. “If you think about it, we’re all just a beat away from making one bad choice that can ruin everything. That’s every day. Stories don’t get more universal than that.”