WARNING: spoilers for Girl Taken ahead.
From today (January 8), new crime thriller Girl Taken is available to stream globally on Paramount+. Based on the novel Baby Doll by Hollie Overton, the six-parter follows twin sisters Lily (Tallulah Evans) and Abby (Delphi Evans), whose lives are shattered when Lily is abducted from their quiet rural English town by beloved local teacher Rick Hansen (Alfie Allen, star of 3 Body Problem season 2).
Jill Halfpenny also stars as Eve, Lily and Abby’s strung out mother trying to find her daughter while keeping her remaining family together. If you’re starting to think this plays out like a regular whodunnit, think again.
Alongside multiple time jumps throughout, Lily doesn’t stay captured for the entirety of the series. It’s easier to view the six episodes in two parts: before the abduction, and after.
That’s all I’m going to say without giving anything else away, but rest assured that it’s a wild and distressing ride from start to finish. Normally, when I interview cast, I ask for their recommendations for what to double bill with their movie or TV show. However, Girl Taken is so dark, I needed to change tack when speaking to stars Jill Halfpenny and Alfie Allen.
Instead, I asked what fans can stream to decompress after the six-episode trauma. Their answer? The 2011 comedy classic that I never even thought of.
Stream Bridesmaids after surviving ‘uncomfortable’ new Paramount+ series Girl Taken
“Definitely Bridesmaids,” Halfpenny tells me. “Everyone’s seen Bridesmaids. If you haven’t, why not? Let’s watch something you’ve already seen. It’s familiar. You know what’s going to happen next. There’s no shocks, there’s no terrible moments. It’s just fun. It’s just a comedy, and it’s not real.”
It’s a genius choice, and I’m not even going to include a trailer for it here – because you really should know what we’re talking about. Frankly, I’m not sure there’s anything that Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph and Melissa McCarthy couldn’t make lighter.
If we had a decompression checklist, Halfpenny has cleared it in one swoop. As she and Allen tell me, the ‘problem’ with Girl Taken is that it’s all to real, despite simultaneously feeling like a world away.
“You hear all the time about people literally living double lives, and you think that somebody couldn’t possibly be able to do that,” Halfpenny adds. “But it’s way more common than you think. I’m not suggesting these people are doing what Rick’s doing, but to find out that the person that you’re with is nothing like the person you think they are… I don’t know how you would go on to ever trust anyone again.
“Because you think, ‘well, I can’t trust my own judgment now.’ And I think the same with Eve. The one person that she thought really was on her side, and confided in was the guy that was doing it. And I think it really shatters your illusion of your sense of being able to trust yourself.”
Didn’t I tell you this series is going to rip your heart out? For Allen, double-edged evil is all in the look and feel of the show itself.
“Things kind of feel like Little House on the Prairie, but really it’s dark and horrible. And that’s what Rick is as a character. He tries to put out this image of himself as being this pillar of the community, which he succeeds at, but really is, is a nasty guy at his core.
“I think that Girl Taken has a really great take on the victim’s perspective and their stories. There is a real sense of kind of realism in it, which is totally by brought by the twins’ performances.”
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