3 out of 5

Developed by: David Turpin

A compelling thriller that successfully avoids dawdling in the male gaze tropes of its premise, but also flirts with them as an odd feint it never quite justifies, in the same way it touches on some compelling character interactions without fully facing them.

Girl Taken concerns sisters Abby (Delphi Evans) and Lily (Tallulah Evans), at that critical point at siblinghood when the bond of the past is being tested by the individuality struggles of early adulthood: Abby is the ‘good’ sister, readying for college; Lily is the ‘bad’ sister, lying to stay out at parties with her boyfriend, Wes (Levi Brown). After a particularly public and emotionally brutal fight between the two, Lily storms off, picked up for a ride home by comely teacher Rick (Alfie Allen)… who promptly kidnaps her and stores her in the basement of a cottage, shackled to the floor and dressed as a housewife.

Rick, a respected member of the community and something of a mentor for Abby, uses his friendship with police detective Tommy (Vikash Bhai) to sway the investigation elsewhere. Time passes. The girls’ mother (Jill Halfpenny) dips into drink. Abby becomes the ‘bad’ sister, her mom’s blame for that divisive argument causing Lily’s disappearance piled on her own, but Abby never gives up hope for her sister’s return – and indeed, we get flashes of what Lily must do to survive, intercut with Rick’s homelife with his wife, Zoe (Niamh Walsh).

The series opens with a flashforward to Lily in the basement, performing servile tasks – making dinner – for Rick, before being physically punished for not being wholly convincing. That’s the feint: in another era, this would easily be a series reveling in that imagery. Girl Taken doesn’t do that past that opening, although there are scenes of violence against women as parts of the narrative. I wouldn’t consider them excessive, I just mean to highlight that David Turpin’s adaptation of Ollie Hoverton’s book tries to retain (as far I understand from some summaries) the source material’s focus on the emotional impact of this event without reveling too much in the abuse itself. At the same time… the show resorts to some lazier impulses, like that opening, and the need to mingle those with its character studies definitely muddies the water: we cannot get deep enough into the psychologies of Abby and Lily.

Or Rick. Rick’s POV plays a part of the novel and there’s some of that here as well, but Alfie Allen either can’t pull off some of the subtleties of Rick’s manipulative personality type, or the directors didn’t really know how to bring it out on screen, or the writers were again leaning into trope and keeping Rick squarely in the creepy serial killer territory to make this a tidier six episodes. Meanwhile, what kept me ultimately watching was often things strayed from that tidiness, very much letting the relationship with the sisters, their mother, and Wes, get pretty messy – be very human. As mentioned, we definitely don’t dive deeply into some of the more tangled webs, but the show also doesn’t try to brush those webs away.

Six episodes was a wise choice. Extended past that, I think we would’ve gotten more filler than value, and shorter than that would’ve boiled this down mostly to its most generic elements. A worthwhile watch, if you can cringe past the opening.