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.
