Ivan Radford | On 26, May 2025

From Salvation and Zoo to Into the Night and You, there’s something comforting about a TV show that leans into its pulpiness – a series that is confident in being the screen equivalent of a paperback novel designed for a quick beach read. The Stolen Girl is the latest brilliantly implausible offering to scratch that itch, this time from Disney+.

The five-part thriller – penned by Code of Silence’s Catherine Moulton – is based on Alex Dahl’s novel, Playdate. That means Moulton doesn’t get much room to bring Code of Silence’s depth to the table, but takes Dahl’s twisting story and structure and paces it out on screen with pin-point precision.

The series begins with Elisa (Denise Gough) letting her daughter, Lucia (Beatrice Campbell), go off on a playdate with new classmate Josie (Robyn Betteridge) , even though the other girl’s mother, Rebecca (Holliday Grainger), is someone she’s only just met. When the two girls disappear along with Rebecca, and the extravagant house they were in turns out to be a holiday let, Elisa is left trying to work out who has kidnapped her daughter and why.

It’s a great starting point for a TV show that taps into the sense of shock any parent would feel faced with a kidnapped child – and that fuels at least the first half of the increasingly preposterous events, with Denise Gough’s believable worry and desperation putting us firmly on her side.

The more things conspire to become ultra-silly, the more work she and the rest of the cast have to do to keep us grounded. And so we meet Jim Sturgess as Elisa’s husband, Fred, a barrister with no end of possible criminal enemies, and One Day’s Ambika Mod as Selma, a journalist who writes a piece that criticises Elisa, then spends the rest of the series trying to make amends by investigating the disapperance herself. Holliday Grainger, meanwhile, has fun dialling up the eery, sinister vibes as the kidnapper.

But the cast can only do so much in the face of such extravagant nonsense, something that the series seems to realise because it distracts from things like convincing character behaviour by hopping abroad to soak up some lush French scenery. What does a remote chateau have to do with a reclusive commune outside Manchester? Does Fred have a secret he’s hiding from Elisa that’s more personal than his career? Why is Selma still employed despite being so unprofessional? Will Lucia’s birthmark help anyone identify her? Why is Elisa a longtime penpal of a prisoner? And what exactly are the police doing all this time?

The show raises questions about social media and public blame, but has a job to do squeezing in every story turn in only five episodes, so they’re largely unexplored in favour of pure narrative propulsion. And in that sense, The Stolen Girl is a thrilling success. With every cliffhanger meticulously placed across five hours, it keeps you hooked with each unlikely development. It’s the perfect rainy Bank Holiday afternoon in – forgettable, undemanding and daftly compulsive.

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