The Stolen Girl: Disney+ drama is an intriguing companion piece to Netflix’s Adolescence

From the opening moments of the new Disney+ series The Stolen Girl, you could be forgiven for thinking that you’ve happened upon a Scandi-noir crime drama.

From the air, we follow a dark Volvo estate driving a dusty road through a tree-lined mountainous landscape. The palette is cool and desaturated, the music underpinned by a distorted electronic buzz. After the sound of a zip, light picks out the face of a child who seems to have been transported in the cramped and claustrophobic boot of the Volvo, that emblem of (Scandinavian) family road safety. “Who are you?” the child asks.

Unlike Scandi-noir, however, there is no elevated title sequence and the five-episode thriller is set between the north of England and the south of France. We cut to the latter rapidly, to a brightly lit balcony, from which Elisa Blix (Denise Gough), private jet flight crew and the mother of the eponymous girl, looks out at the Côte D’Azur.

In the first episode, Elisa and her husband, criminal lawyer Fred (Jim Sturgess) realise that their eldest child, Lucia, has been kidnapped while on a hastily arranged sleepover at a new school friend’s house.

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A number of stylistic motifs contribute to the sense of unease which pervades The Stolen Girl. The camera peers around corners into dark, claustrophobic spaces. It creeps along the ground, or tracks slowly towards buildings. In the opening sequence, for example, it drifts through lush, dark foliage towards stone steps, offering a glimpse of a doorway at their apex.

The significance of this repeated shot doesn’t become clear until near the end of the series. Similarly, motifs from the elaborate décor of the Blixes’ “perfect” home are disturbingly echoed later in the setting of the French villa. As the drama proceeds, flashbacks and memories provide the opportunity to reassess and reinterpret, for the characters and the viewer.

The Stolen Girl is meticulously constructed to unsettle and intrigue the viewer, from sound design and imagery to narrative organisation.

For the most part, we discover and interpret clues along with another main character – doggedly persistent journalist Selma Desai (Ambika Mod). Her grasp of social media and pop psychology leads her to solve the case ahead of the detectives working it.

I found myself having light-bulb moments with, and occasionally just before, Selma – an effective and carefully designed immersion technique which, along with frequent reversals and twists, keeps us guessing until near the very end. It’s clever, and satisfying for the attentive viewer as the whole-series release in the UK makes it easily bingeable and easy to pick up clues.

The series was adapted for television by Catherine Moulton from Alex Dahl’s 2020 novel Playdate. It centres on two mothers and a female journalist, with a young female victim at the centre. This makes it a fascinating companion piece to the much-discussed recent Netflix drama Adolescence, which has been critiqued for its focus on the young male perpetrator and his family.

Read more: Adolescence in schools: TV show's portrayal of one boyhood may do more harm than good when used as a teaching tool

There are very clear references to the Madeleine McCann case in The Stolen Girl. Not just in the similarly posed “victim ID” photo of Lucia, but also in the persistent blame directed at her mother Elisa. Described as a “jet-set mum-fluencer”, her decision in a harried moment between work and home facilitated the abduction of her daughter. “She spent half her childhood with me while you were up in the air”, claims her mother-in-law.

The drama unfolds and the mystery is revealed through a highly screen-literate pastiche of gothic, noir and horror tropes. Central characters are narrated through a costume story told in shirts: tucked in, tied at the waist, over-sized, striped, floral and tailored. The mise-en-scène of The Stolen Girl is simultaneously presented as aspirational (I spotted a number of well-known fancy brands) and carefully crafted to present an unreliable façade, as the perfect life of the white middle-class family at the series’ centre is systematically unpicked.

As it unravels, a nexus of trauma, infidelity, financial insecurity, lies and secrets are revealed. Like Adolescence, the programme identifies social media as a factor in facilitating crime, but also, through Selma, as an instrument of solving it.

Rachel Moseley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.