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5 hours ago
2
I do love a premise that is sheer simplicity, yet yields potentially infinite terror. I’m in, I say! Have at it! So I settled in for a right good terrify, courtesy of The Stolen Girl (adapted by Catherine Moulton from the 2020 thriller Playdate by Alex Dahl). It begins with a mother letting her child go for a sleepover with a new girl at her school and arriving to pick her up the next day to find only a cleaning lady there – who explains that this is just a holiday let and that the last family there have gone. “Dum-dum-daaaaah,” I hope you are saying, otherwise you are in entirely the wrong mood for this stuff.
Denise Gough stars as Elisa, mother of the missing girl, Lucia (Beatrice Cohen). Then there’s Jim Sturgess as Lucia’s father, Fred, and Holliday Grainger as Rebecca, mother of Lucia’s new friend Josie (Robyn Betteridge) and unexpected flight risk. Let the games begin! Who is Rebecca really and what is her interest in Lucia? Is she a woman/mother with mental health problems, a child trafficker, or someone with a festering grudge against Elisa and keen to hit her where it most hurts? Or is it all something to do with Fred’s work as a criminal barrister? Could Sarah Banks, who recently inveigled Fred into a near-affair, have anything to do with it? Also, Lucia has a birthmark on her back that might as well be in the shape of Chekhov’s gun, so that’s going to have a pivotal role at some point.
But we need more! So we have journalist Selma Desai (Ambika Mod) digging into everyone’s business and turning up so many leads that one is forced to ask a) what do the police do all day? and b) why is journalism a dying industry and have reporters thought of turning themselves into private detectives instead? Soon we must also ask what bearing a character’s strange upbringing as part of an anarcho-communist settlement has on her current situation, who the prisoner sending letters to Elisa is, and whether Fred has any more secrets – say, about £200,000 worth – that he’d like to share with the group.
As the five episodes unfold, there are cursory and slightly ham-fisted attempts to interrogate the effects of internet campaigns (which Elisa undertakes against the advice of the police) to raise awareness of missing children. The programme also tries to take on the tendency of any suffering mother to be vilified by a bizarrely vengeful public for any perceived misstep (how, for example, could Elisa let her daughter stay overnight with a family she didn’t know properly?), while any paternal failings go unremarked. But it is not really interested in deep-diving on those, and so the entertaining preposterousness mounts instead. Soon we are splitting our time between England and France and the screws are tightening around various guilty parties. The latter’s number increases as we uncover backstories through flashbacks, which manage to stay the right side of intrusive and/or irritating.
The drama bombs along at a fast enough pace for you barely to notice that much of the plot hangs on Selma’s borderline clairvoyant powers – from the outset, when she deduces from no apparent evidence that there is something off about Elisa, on through various other leaps of faith and logic that get us from A to B to C on time. But, as I say, a certain expectation of preposterousness is built into a premise such as “Playdate turns into kidnapping – FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WHAT WOULD YOU DO?!” and it behoves us all to cut the necessary slack. Though I’m still not sure whether this should encompass the fact that an ambitious twentysomething reporter acts more like a stroppy teen throwing her emotions around than anything else. There’s preposterous and then there’s nonsense and there’s only room for one of them.
But it is all done with just enough chutzpah and style to get you over any niggles. The pieces of the jigsaw arrive – ah, Photoshopping! Ah, news photographers’ unused shots from a long-ago fatal car accident! Ah, pregnancy dates! – and are slotted in at satisfyingly frequent intervals to keep the show on the road. It won’t linger in your mind for a second after you finish it, but you will have had five hours of a pretty good time.
