Girl Taken: Captivity and Freedom in a Miniseries on the Consequences of Evil
Alfie Allen is the diabolical villain in the Paramount+ miniseries, an adaptation of a novel that tells the hell faced by a student at the hands of her teacher.
Lily and her twin sister Abby are seventeen years old and live with their single mother Eve in a small rural town in northern England. The girls have diametrically opposite personalities: Abby is studious and focused on her academic future, while Lily is more interested in parties and going out with her boyfriend Wes. They both attend the English class of the charismatic Professor Hansen, an apparently benevolent figure who dispenses advice and emotional support to his students.
After an argument with Abby during a party with friends, Lily decides to walk home. Hansen, who was nearby, offers her a ride in his car, drugs her, and takes her to an isolated cottage where she will remain imprisoned for a long time. The kidnapping attracts public attention, but the desperate searches by local police prove futile. Rick keeps his young victim segregated in the basement of an isolated cottage deep in the forest, lying daily to his naive wife Zoe and subjecting the girl to all kinds of physical and psychological violence. Until...
Girl Taken: Starting Life Anew
Girl Taken, a new original Paramount+ miniseries, is an adaptation of the novel The House at the End of the Lane, published in 2016 by Hollie Overton. The result is a product of fluctuating quality that, while successfully exploiting the ambiguity of an excellent Alfie Allen, suffers from narrative and melodramatic contortions that are not always credible, so much so that it stretches excessively into six episodes with an average duration of about fifty minutes each.
Stories of girls abducted by cunning and unscrupulous individuals have been seen countless times, both on the small and large screen, drawing from true crime or pure fiction as in this case. While the first part of the season follows a rather classic and unoriginal pattern, the second attempts to inject new tension into the narrative through the protagonist's escape and the difficult journey of returning to a presumed normality. A device that could have offered interesting insights into trauma processing, both for the person directly involved and for her loved ones, but which is exploited with often implausible solutions, including shared boyfriends, inept police officers, and at least daring escapes, capable of undermining the suspension of disbelief beyond measure.
The series' focus is not the voyeurism of crime, but its psychological consequences, as mentioned, a potentially interesting starting point if approached with the right depth. When Lily finally manages to escape that hell, we discover that the real problems for her and her family are far from over, but several forced choices in the management of secondary characters prevent us from fully empathizing with a figure understandably tormented by a situation unbearable for anyone.
Inside the Heart, Dark and Otherwise, of the Characters
As mentioned, the cast carries the weight of the entire operation. Among the most successful choices is certainly the casting of Tallulah and Delphi Evans, real-life sisters, called here to play the twin protagonists: the natural chemistry between the two — that familiarity that cannot be acted but only lived — makes the bond genuine between Lily and Abby even when the script severely tests its resilience.
And then there's naturally Alfie Allen, who plays one of the most unsettling and Mephistophelian villains of recent times. The former Theon Greyjoy from Game of Thrones is terrifying precisely because he is far from the archetype of the monster: a methodical and calculating predator, who hides his cruelty behind the reassuring mask of the beloved teacher and the seemingly irreproachable family man. But when cornered, a chilling cynicism emerges, supported by a gaze and restrained expressiveness that hint at pure evil.