As if the title didn’t make things clear enough, the first scenes of Disney+’s new thriller, The Stolen Girl, set things up perfectly.
There’s a child in the boot of a car and she doesn’t know where she is. It’s followed by a montage of her mother Elisa Blix, played by the brilliant Denise Gough, going about her life as an air stewardess on private jets completely oblivious of what is about to go down. When she finds out that her daughter is missing, cue fireworks.
A truly original missing-person drama is hard to write, and The Stolen Girl does fall back on some classic clichés, but the premise, based on the book Playdate by Alex Dahl, is brilliant.
Elisa, running late from work one day, bumps into Rebecca (Holliday Grainger) as they pick their daughters up from a fancy school in Cheshire. After a few jokes about the traffic in town, Elisa eventually lets 9-year-old Lucia (Beatrice Campbell) go for a playdate with Rebecca’s daughter, Josephine (Robyn Betteridge).
Everything seems fine. Rebecca lives in a stunning exposed-brick and French window-clad house and even drinks the most civilised of all drinks, kombucha: “Sorry, it’s not quite champagne, but it costs as much.” And yet, Rebecca is not quite who she seems, and that playdate goes very wrong when she and both girls suddenly disappear.
Nobody is safe from scrutiny from here onwards. Elisa soon finds herself under fire for allowing her daughter on a playdate with someone she didn’t know, while she and her successful lawyer husband Fred (Jim Sturgess) have many of their own secrets that slowly make it out into the light of day.
Fred is currently defending an ex-gang member at work and may or may not have had a brief dalliance with another woman. Meanwhile, hidden details about Elisa’s past life start coming to the surface, which may or may not involve a very middle class, red-garment-wearing cult. No one is saying anything, and it seems that everyone is on a personal mission to find Lucia before historic crimes start being uncovered. And when they do, it threatens to tear the family apart.
Interestingly, the police in this universe don’t seem to consider this missing-person case an urgent matter, instead leaving things to the curious journalist for Dash Voice, Selma Desai, played by Ambika Mod.
Fortunately, Selma soon finds herself in possession of what most journalists can only dream of: police officers willing to give her crucial information about the case and an ability to hop on her phone and find out any information in the blink of an eye. Don’t think about it too much; at least Mod is excellent in the role.
As might be evident from the above, the women in this show are the real stars – there is a poignancy to the way maternal love is explored, in all its facets. Gough and Grainger play women who are utterly obsessed with and motivated by their children, and they teeter on the edge of mania throughout. Their mirrored characterisation becomes the heart of the series.
Some of the twists and turns throughout are a little predictable, and the ending twist is eminently guessable, but Gough, Grainger and Mod keep things compelling, serving up lashings of tense, psychological drama that escalates as we dive into their lives. Plus, there’s no denying it looks gorgeous: from Elisa’s beautiful suburban house, dominated by teals, navies and oranges, to the picturesque French villages that crop up later. There are no gritty squats or dishevelled houses here; even the passport-forger lives in an antique-style flat with a huge vintage record collection.
Thriller-wise, The Stolen Girl never quite lives up to the heart-stopping moment of realisation in the first episode that Rebecca was not quite everything she seemed. But the delicacy with which parenthood and grief are portrayed lend a realism to the drama that some of the mid-series revelations might not. The end result is addictive stuff.
The Stolen Girl is streaming on Disney+ from April 16
