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A summary of Girl Taken is disheartening; a teenage girl is abducted by a man she trusted and kept for his own grim purposes in a remote secret location, and must use her wits to survive the depravities and maybe one day escape. But in full, Girl Taken, like the 2016 book Baby Doll by Hollie Overton on which it is based, is something much better. It takes the neglected parts of such stories – the sadder, quieter, far less titillating and voyeuristic aspects of what it means to take a person out of her home, her world and her life, and away from those of the people who love her – and fleshes all that out instead. It makes for a slower burn, but a much more deeply engaging and psychologically complex thriller than we customarily expect from such a setup, and – in asking what it really means to survive an act of profound violence – harrowing in a more valuable way.
Lily and Abby (played with depth and delicacy by Tallulah and Delphi Evans) are twin 17-year-olds, on the cusp of – well, everything really, as you are when you are happy teenage girls. We meet them on the last day of the summer term. Lily is set to enjoy the summer with her lovely boyfriend Wes (Levi Brown, who was so extraordinary in 2024’s This Town) and partying, and Abby is laying plans to go to university. She is the star pupil in Mr Hansen’s English class (“You can start calling me Rick now” he says as the final school bell goes) and the popular young teacher has always encouraged her ambitions.
Girl Taken is a lean but unhurried six-parter and takes time to build the girls’ world in enough detail that we feel the pain when one of them is wrenched out of it by the will of one man. In the first of many upendings of expectations, Rick (Alfie Allen, in a fantastic and – given how much he clearly relishes the meaty role – fantastically restrained performance) abducts Lily. In one of several improving changes to the book (and it’s a good book), the message is that a predator does not need a connection to an individual; any momentarily vulnerable young girl will do. This adds a slightly different gloss from usual to the question of motivation and places the blame for his action more assertively on the perpetrator than usual, however much he tries to muddy the waters later on.
Rick’s sexual and other violence against Lily takes place almost entirely off screen. We focus instead on the guilt consuming Abby (whose argument with Lily is what led her to be walking home alone and – it is surmised – taken by a stranger somewhere along the way) and the flailing despair of their mother, Eve (Jill Halfpenny, bringing her all to an underwritten part). In keeping with the unsensationalised mood of the drama, the refuge Eve takes in drink results in a functional rather than histrionic alcoholism and is all the sadder and more credible for that.
We see Rick insinuating himself into the search for Lily and, in later years, keeping in touch with the family, who are grateful for his support as the rest of the town and the media move on. There is a fine depiction of the coercive control Rick exerts over his wife that again works against the idea, as a lesser thriller would have it, that such sadistic monsters hide their true selves from everyone, that they exist as outliers, eruptions of pure evil rather than as points on a continuum.
It is no spoiler to say that Lily escapes. The second half of the series has her recovery – such as it is, such as it can be – and that of her family at the forefront, and the damage that a perpetrator can continue to inflict even from behind bars when he knows how to work the justice system to his advantage. The fight for legal justice is interwoven with the fight of the family to accept what has happened to Lily and to the rest of them while she was away, and to construct a new normal that will allow them to move on, one day, in relative peace. There are enough twists and reveals as the episodes unfurl to let the show retain its thriller title, but Girl Taken gives a lot more than that.
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Girl Taken is on Paramount+ now.
