The Stolen Girl, Disney+, review: the TV equivalent of an airport read
'Posh house' drama shows no sign of waning. If you ignore the child kidnapping/parental catastrophe angle of The Stolen Girl (Disney+) there is so much useful interiors advice to be found here. I don't know whether streamers have to show that Product Placement 'P' logo at the beginning of dramas like they do on poor old ITV, but holy moly I want to know what the sofa was they were sitting on (when the police came round to arrest whoever it was). And never mind Jim Sturgess's dad having a nervous breakdown as he confessed to a bout of extramarital phone-sex – just look at the kitchen island he broke down on! Granite surfaces to die for.
From which you'll gather that The Stolen Girl, a new thriller about a missing child, is quite hard to take seriously. It doesn't help that the story as it first appears is rather familiar: when nine-year-old Lucia begs her mummy Elisa (Denise Gough) for an overnight playdate with her new best friend Josie, Elisa agrees. Whoops. Josie's mum Rebecca (Holliday Grainger) is not at all what she seems, as Elisa discovers the next day when Elisa doesn't come home and Rebecca's posh house turns out to have been an Airbnb. So unfolds The Missing but in Cheshire. Faultlines in Elisa and Fred's (Sturgess) marriage quickly emerge, no one is who they seem and did I mention how cool the wallpaper is?
Anyway, The Stolen Girl is the TV equivalent of an airport read, schlocky trash that moves at a breakneck pace. The idea is that with such dizzying haste, you won't have time to pause for thought and ask testing questions such as, 'How come journalist Ambika Mod is able to find out things about both dodgy mums the police can't, using only her phone?' And, 'What must the current crop of TV scripts be like if actors of this calibre are taking jobs like this?' Or, more pointedly, 'How much must Disney be paying?'
Because, make no mistake, the cast of The Stolen Girl is its ace in the hole. It elevates another 'The Girl on the Train who Peaked from Behind the Net Curtain'-style psych thriller to a level of robust watchability. Denise Gough, Holliday Grainger and Ambika Mod (rocking a vintage Ford Cortina that marks the return of the impractical statement vehicle to crime dramas) are a superb central trio. Gough in particular is one of those performers who can turn a stage direction like 'she starts crying' into something epiphanic.
Grainger, meanwhile, plants her flag in that moral no man's land where her Rebecca, who initially appears to be the villain of the piece, nibbles at your sympathy and lodges in your brain. The tension in The Stolen Girl – and whatever else it is, it grips like duct tape – comes as much from these performances as from the plot. If only they could give the actors a little more to work with.
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