Vanished

The Girl on the Missing Train

A very specific subgenre is taking shape now, and for lack of a better term I’ll call it “Kaley Cuoco panics abroad.” After *The Flight Attendant* and *Role Play*, you’d be forgiven for thinking *Vanished* would be another winking star vehicle built around her high-strung charm. It isn’t. David Hilton and Preston Thompson set up something familiar, romantic trip, handsome boyfriend, Europe, disappearance, but Barnaby Thompson directs it with much less playfulness than you’d expect. The panic here is procedural, bureaucratic, and weirdly mundane, which makes it land harder.

Alice Monroe, played by Cuoco, is an archaeologist on the cusp of a dream job at Princeton. She thinks she’s building a future. Tom, her boyfriend, says all the right things about moving forward together, but Sam Claflin makes him feel slightly absent even before anything goes wrong. In the hotel scenes, he’s there physically, yet his eyes keep drifting somewhere else, as if part of him has already left.



Then comes the train. Paris to Avignon. Tom gets up to take a call. Alice falls asleep. She wakes to an empty seat and, at first, the kind of mild annoyance that belongs to ordinary travel. Thompson stages the escalation beautifully. She walks the aisles, embarrassed, then uneasy, then suddenly frantic. The sound design strips almost everything away until all you hear is the train itself and the rhythm of panic setting in. When Tom finally picks up the phone, there’s only splashing, a car door, and then silence.

Cuoco shifts well here. Unlike Cassie in *The Flight Attendant*, Alice isn’t a lovable disaster. She’s competent, structured, a woman who believes systems will hold if she pushes on them correctly. That’s exactly why the unraveling works. Her shoulders climb toward her ears and she starts treating Tom’s disappearance like an excavation. Layer by layer, carefully, refusing to stop even when what she finds gets uglier. Pairing her with Karin Viard’s prickly investigative journalist is a smart move. Viard gives the show a good dose of abrasion.



Whether the back half works probably depends on how forgiving you are with thriller machinery. Once Alice gets pulled into Tom’s ties to a questionable charity network and dangerous figures in Marseille, the series starts leaning on exposition. Matthias Schweighöfer, as a shady charity boss, ends up carrying a lot of explanation the camera really should have been trusted to handle. Robert Lloyd at the *Los Angeles Times* said the show "unravels a mystery but lacks spark and suspense," and that criticism isn’t unfair. The gears show. You can feel the script nudging Alice from one clue to the next.

Still, the relationship wreckage kept me watching. There’s something humiliatingly universal in the idea that the person beside you at dinner may be almost entirely fictional. We all want to believe we’d notice the seams. Usually we don’t.



*Vanished* isn’t reinventing anything, and I doubt it will become a defining thriller of 2026. But as a compact study of trust breaking down, it does the job. Cuoco grounds the bigger criminal nonsense in something much more recognizable: the awful embarrassment of realizing you were fooled by someone you loved.