The tragedy of missing children drives a world of drama

According to the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children, based in Virginia, an estimated 20,000 children are reported missing each year in Australia. In the UK, the number is almost 113,000; in the US, it’s an astronomical 460,000. And the Centre believes that these figures are more than likely to be underestimations.

For victims, it must be terrifying, whatever the outcome; for countries where the horrors occur, they’re a national shame; for every parent, they’re an inescapable threat; for anyone who’s directly suffered a loss, they’re a living hell. And for storytellers, they’ve always been a goldmine of attention-grabbling plot devices, mysteries that might never be solved, reminders that the everyday order which we take for granted is but a look away from devastating chaos.

A glance at recent releases through our streaming services gives us a pretty good impression of how stories like this are generally told around the globe. Scenes of a family happily going about its business are abruptly interrupted when a parent is momentarily distracted and a child vanishes, an occurrence that usually takes place out of frame, as in the opening sequences of The Snow Girl, (La chica de nieve, Spain, 2023, Netflix) and Crossroads: A New Beginning (France, 2021, Acorn).

Pandemonium follows. Usually that’s the last we see of the child, at least until he or she is found. If he or she is found. The disappearance is what sets the plot in motion, but who the child is or what his or her feelings might be are generally left to the imagination. Also absent are the perpetrators and their motives. The stories’ attention is almost always on how others deal with the disappearance.

Sometimes, it’s the parents who try to find out what happened, as in Crossroads; sometimes an official investigator becomes involved, like the attorney-general and his deputy in Crime Diaries: The Search (Historia de un crimen: la búsqueda, Mexico, 2020, Netflix) or the benign policeman in Hollington Drive (UK, 2021, Foxtel Now). Or the female journalists in The Search and The Snow Girl.

Whatever the case, another plot line is generally woven into the search, perhaps to do with the parents, as in Hollington Drive. Or with the personal life of the investigator, such as the journalist in The Snow Girl. Or with broader questions about the wider social world in which the disappearance has taken place, as in The Search.

The best of the current offerings about child disappearances, The Search is the third in an international series based on real-life crimes. The first is Crime Diaries: The Candidate (2019, Mexico), the second Crime Diaries: Night Out (Colombia, 2019, both also on Netflix). A six-part drama, inspired by “one of the most high-profile, tragic and controversial cases in Mexico’s history”, it’s also the least conventional of the recent batch.

It begins as news breaks of the discovery of four-year-old Paulette’s body in her bed nine days after she’d been reported missing from her home in Interlomas, an exclusive compound outside Mexico City. Any suspense regarding her fate is thus discarded from the beginning, the series immediately moving into a flashback covering the period following her disappearance.

The local authorities under the direction of the self-centred, ineffectual state attorney-general (Dario Yazbek Bernal, Gael Garcia Bernal’s half-brother) involve themselves, routinely rather than urgently; an ambitious journalist (Regina Blandon) is assigned to the case and immediately courts controversy. “Twenty-two girls go missing in the state of Mexico and nobody does anything,” she says. “But just one goes missing in Interlomas…”

As the bureaucratic chains of responsibility become more tangled and the finger of suspicion begins to point at the parents, it becomes clear that the authorities are concerned only about covering their backs and those of their friends and political allies. Alas, there are no heroes here: money, power and influence are, finally, all that matters.

Teetering on the edge of farce right from the start – Paulette’s body has been found in her own bed! After nine days! – The Search doesn’t pull any punches. While it begins as a sensational story about a little girl who’s gone missing, it grows into a scathing portrait of a society that has lost the capacity to care, its institutions concerned to do nothing more than perpetuate power and privilege.

While class differences, along with marital discord, also pervade the missing-child drama in Sophie Petzal’s Hollington Drive, the four-part series fails to make anything significant of them. The chief setting is an affluent neighbourhood somewhere in the English countryside, the street of the title (played by Ardwyn Walk in Dinas Powys in southern Wales) made up of homes that resemble dolls’ houses and reflect the superficially ordered existences of the occupants.

However, the facade is well and truly shattered after the disappearance of a little boy who lives nearby with his less prosperous parents. It’s a minor variation on the conventional openings of missing-child stories: this time, the heartbroken mother and father become secondary and the impact of their catastrophe on two local families becomes the series’ focal point.

Theresa (Anna Maxwell Martin) suspects her son might be involved and sets out to protect him; her sister, Helen (Rachael Stirling), the local headmistress, does the same for her daughter. Neither confides in her husband and their fabrications create a network of suspicion and mistrust from which no one is exempt.

It’s a promising set-up and the strikingly stripped-back setting creates a world in which all that matters are the interactions between the central characters as they’re swept along by their deceptions. But the fate of the missing boy turns out to be a clumsy plot contrivance and the tensions between the characters finally peter out into insignificance.

Primarily set in Malaga on the south coast of Spain, based in part on a 2020 novel by Javier Castillo, and spanning more than a decade, The Snow Girl begins in classic style. During a festival to celebrate Three Kings Day, with the rain pouring, a five-year-old girl goes missing when her father’s attention is briefly diverted. Miren (Milena Smit), a trainee journalist, takes on the case, her investigation not only guiding her towards revelations to do with the missing girl but also, in a clumsily incorporated addition to the book, leading her back into her own troubled past.

Moving back and forth in time, the six-part series takes an allusive approach, its edgy framings and gloomy settings lending her search a noirish unease as she’s warned that she’s venturing into dangerous places “where monsters live”. What she eventually discovers, though, turns out to be very different from what she’d expected, and gives a human (albeit cliched) face to the kidnappers. Alas, her quest across the years is marred by a series of all-too-convenient plot manoeuvres that strain credulity way beyond breaking point. A sequel looms, apparently to be based on Castillo’s subsequent novel, The Game of the Soul.

By way of contrast, it’s a bright sunny day on a deserted beach by her home when, as Crossroads: A New Beginning opens, defence attorney Sophia Cross (Alexia Barlia) is distracted and her five-year-old son vanishes. However, unlike the other series, Crossroads is a pilot for an ongoing one. Shot in Ostend and Antwerp in Belgium, it’s made up of three accomplished two-part episodes.

The boy’s disappearance becomes part of Sophie’s backstory as she quits her job and becomes a detective for the unit run by her husband (Thomas Jouannet). Quiet, self-assured and very smart, Sophie adjusts well to her new role, although she and her husband are still grappling with their loss. As she becomes involved in a series of cases – all dealing with traumatised families – she’s also unofficially continuing her search for her son, refusing to abandon hope that their family will be reunited. A second season is promised.

The Snow Girl and Crime Diaries: The Search are on Netflix. Hollington Drive is on Foxtel Now. Crossroads: A New Beginning is on Acorn.

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