Girl Taken

The Quiet Architecture of a Kidnapping

I'm not sure when the abduction thriller became our default form of television comfort food, but here we're. You know the rhythm by heart. The sleepy rural town. The desaturated color palette. The frantic mother screaming into a police radio while a moody cover of a pop song plays over the opening credits. It's a genre that often treats female trauma as an escape room for the audience to solve. So when I sat down to watch the six-part Paramount+ limited series Girl Taken, I braced myself for the usual grim procedural.



What I found instead was something far more uncomfortable. Adapted by David Turpin, Suzanne Cowie, and Nessah Muthy from Hollie Overton's 2016 novel Baby Doll, the series doesn't care much about the mystery of "whodunit." We know who did it immediately. The horror here isn't the mystery of the crime, but the radioactive half-life of its aftermath.

Alfie Allen plays Rick Hansen, a popular high school English teacher who snatches 17-year-old Lily (Tallulah Evans) and locks her in a rural cottage basement for five years. I've often wondered why Allen keeps taking roles as feckless, deeply unsettling men, but nobody on television does it better. He doesn't play Rick as a cartoonish predator. He plays him as a man who genuinely believes his own benign, helpful narrative. He's terrifyingly ordinary.