The Stolen Girl feels fresher and fleeter than your average crime miniseries

As a nondescript station wagon snakes through the sun-kissed dirt roads of Southern France, thumps from the trunk of the car are barely audible over the blaring cicadas. Outside a remote villa, the trunk opens, and we meet nine-year-old Lucia Blix (Beatrice Cohen), who squints through the sunlight to ask her captor, “Who are you?” That’s how we’re welcomed into the world of The Stolen Girl, a show that, in a sea of  missing-child crime dramas from the U.K., stands out initially because of its setup: Lucia’s disappearance is not a question of who’s responsible but why.    

The first episode then jumps back in time to before the kidnapping. Harried mother Elisa Blix (Denise Gough) is late to pick Lucia up from school—again—and meets Rebecca Walsh (Holliday Grainger) and her daughter, Josie, both of whom Lucia has taken an instant shine to. A quick flash of charm from Rebecca and some pestering from the kids swiftly seals the deal for a sleepover. But when Elisa and husband Fred (Jim Sturgess) get to Rebecca’s lavish house the next morning, a cleaner answers the door and explains that no one lives there. It’s an AirBnB, and it hasn’t been rented out for weeks. So begins the high-profile search for Lucia and Rebecca, who the police curiously have no record of ever existing. 

In its first couple of hours, The Stolen Girl doesn’t tread much new ground as the frantic Elisa chases down every immediate lead. Rebecca is like a ghost and seems to know just where to stand so her face is never picked up by CCTV. And Fred is hiding some sleazy secrets of his own, as lawyer husbands in thrillers are preternaturally wont to do. Meanwhile, a well-meaning if overzealous journalist, Selma Desai (Ambika Mod), is eager to get to the bottom of things to the annoyance of the police and, later, Elisa. It turns out Elisa has long-buried secrets, too, some of which involve a refreshingly offbeat red- and pink-clad cult in a small English village. 

Then there’s Rebecca herself, whose mission and motives become clearer as the search intensifies back in England. Grainger, who recently left her mark in Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17, is excellent as the curtain is slowly pulled back on Rebecca, who’s neither a victim nor a villain. It’s this kind of paradoxical character work that makes The Stolen Girl irresistibly entertaining, even if it’s to a tune we already know. Gough in particular is outstanding, showing the complicated range viewers know she’s capable of after her turn as the multilayered Imperial Officer Dedra Meero in Andor. Elisa is on a noble quest, but there’s a darkness beneath her tenacity that, early on, hints that she set certain events in motion long before Lucia vanished.