Girl Taken Review – Alfie Allen is incredible in this twisted tale of teenage kidnapping | television

A The summary of The Taken Girl is depressing. A teenage girl is kidnapped by a man she trusts and keeping her for his own dark purposes in a remote secret location, and she must use her wits to survive the distractions and perhaps one day escape. But overall, Girl Taken, like the 2016 Baby Doll book by Hollie Overton on which it was based, is much better. It takes the neglected parts of such stories — the sadder, the quieter, the far less dramatic and voyeuristic aspects of what it means to take someone out of her home, her world, her life, and away from the people who love her — and embodies all of that instead. It makes for a slower burn, but it’s a more engaging and psychologically complex thriller than we’d normally expect from such a setting, and when we question what it’s really like to survive an act of visceral violence, it’s horrifying in a more valuable way.

Lily and Abby (played with depth and precision by Tallulah and Delphi Evans) are 17-year-old twins, on the cusp of – well, everything really, as you do when you’re happy teenage girls. We meet them on the last day of the summer semester. Lily is set to enjoy the summer with her sweet boyfriend Wes (Levi Brown, who was absolutely phenomenal in 2024’s This Town) and partying, and Abby makes plans to go to college. She’s the star student in Mr. Hansen’s English class (“You can start calling me Brick now,” he says as the final school bell rings) and the popular young teacher is always encouraging of her ambitions.

Girl Taken is a lean but slow six-parter that takes its time to build the girls’ world in enough detail that we feel the pain when one of them is snatched from it by the will of one man. In the first of many reversals of expectations, Rick (Alfie Allen, in a fantastically restrained performance – given how much he clearly relishes the meaty role) kidnaps Lily. In one of the many changes made to the book (which is a good book), the message is that a predator does not need contact with an individual; Any girl who is momentarily weak will do this. This adds a slightly different sheen than usual to the question of motive and places the blame for his actions more firmly on the perpetrator than usual, no matter how much he later tries to muddy the waters.

The sexual and other violence that Rick inflicts on Lily occurs almost entirely off-screen. We focus instead on the guilt of Abby (whose argument with Lily leads her to walk home alone, and – it’s thought – taken by a stranger somewhere along the way) and the extreme desperation of their mother, Eve (Jill Halfpenny, all driving her to a guaranteed part). In keeping with the non-dramatic mood, the refuge Eve takes in drinking leads to functional rather than hysterical alcoholism, which is both sadder and more believable for that.

We see Rick sneaking into the search for Lily and, in later years, staying in touch with the family, who are grateful for his support while the rest of the town and the media step up. There is a good depiction of the coercive control that Rick exerts over his wife that again works against the idea, less dramatic as it may seem, that such sadistic monsters hide their true selves from everyone, that they exist as outliers, outbursts of pure evil rather than as points on a continuum.

It’s not a spoiler to say that Lily runs away. The second half of the series takes her recovery — as it is, as it can be — and her family’s recovery to the fore, and the damage a perpetrator can continue to do even from behind bars when they know how the justice system works in their favor. The struggle for legal justice is intertwined with the family’s struggle to accept what happened to Lily and the rest during her absence, and to build a new normal that will allow them to move forward, one day, in relative peace. There are enough twists and reveals as the episodes unfold to allow the series to retain its exciting title, but Girl Taken offers so much more than that.