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.



Watch the scene on the last day of the summer term. Rick is talking to Lily's twin sister, Abby (played by Tallulah's real-life sister, Delphi Evans). He smiles with that quiet, encouraging warmth that makes teenagers feel like adults. The final bell rings. "You can start calling me Rick now," he tells her, his posture relaxed, his voice dropping just a half-octave into something intimate. It's a masterclass in grooming disguised as mentorship. (The sickening twist of the pilot is that Rick actually intends to kidnap Abby, but ends up snatching Lily by circumstance).

When Lily finally escapes years later, the show takes a sharp left turn. It shifts from a captivity narrative into a bruising domestic drama about a family that doesn't know how to fit back together. Jill Halfpenny plays the girls' mother, Eve, and she makes a choice I still couldn't look away from. Instead of the noble, long-suffering matriarch, Eve has devolved into a bitter, toxic alcoholic. She spent five years waiting for a ghost, and the living girl who returns doesn't fit the shrine she built. *The Guardian*'s Lucy Mangan nailed the show's specific gravity, noting that it focuses on "the sadder, quieter, far less titillating and voyeuristic aspects of what it means to take a person out of her home."



Whether that structure totally works depends on your patience for shifting gears. The show stumbles badly in its back half. *RogerEbert.com*'s Nandini Balial rightly pointed out that the series drops "drastically in quality by the third episode," losing its tight psychological grip in favor of a little repetitive court battles and manhunt mechanics. The editing, initially so nimble, starts to drag.

But even when the script loses its way, the bodies on screen tell the truth. Tallulah Evans carries the weight of a girl who realizes that escaping the basement was only the first, and perhaps easiest, part of getting free. It's a messy, imperfect show. I'm still thinking about it anyway.