Mel Harris is Dr Laurel O'Connor, a psychiatrist in Charlotte who is given 16 year old Sharon Hartly (Candace Cameron) to assess. Detective Thomas McGregor (Gregg Henry) believes that Sharon has killed her parents, Richard and Allison, and is faking her condition. As Sharon won't talk, Laurel seeks information elsewhere, which makes Laurel a target for burglary and death threats. However a hospital incident allows for a return to the home where the killings took place, and the killer is revealed.
Harris is very still here and this stoicism works for her character, with director Michael Scott probably using her iconic face better than most other directors have. At times she looks very beautiful when listening, enacts a shocked surprise more convincingly than others doing the same thing, and has a tiny smile in response to being told `There's not a damn thing in the world that justifies shooting your parents in cold blood'. She also gets to be physical, climbing out of a burning room, jumping through glass, being slapped, and ending up like a ragged doll with black smudges as she sits on a bench. Laurel comments that what attracts her to Sharon is her sense of aloneness. Laurel is accused of the standard becoming too emotionally involved, or maybe it's the length of her hair which recalls Garbo in retirement circa 1946, but at times Harris pauses and we too can see Laurel's aloneness, that no one else picks up on.
The teleplay by Mark Homer uses Laurel talking into tape recorder for a form of narration, but the climax reads as too melodramatic, after a teasing ambiguity surrounding Sharon. We never see either parent which undermines the reason for the killer's act, and McGregor's rationale for wanting Laurel to remove herself from Sharon's case is just as inexplicable. Homer's use of the Hartly lawyer Frank Bodin (Alex McArthur) is also a red herring.
Scott's tilted camera and slow motion might be passable as a genre cliche if he didn't also add operatic voices to the music score of Philip Giffin, and even Laurel first talking to Sharon to calm an outburst uses Sharon's echo chamber-ed interpretation of Harris' voice.
