The Woman Who Cried Kidnap: "Disappearance at Clifton Hill" beguiles as a drifty, winding mystery


Disappearance at Clifton Hill (2020)
101 min.
Release Date: February 28, 2020 (Limited & VOD)

“Disappearance at Clifton Hill” doesn’t have to try too hard to be offbeat when it’s a Canadian neo-noir set in Niagara Falls, a tourist-trap location that is, as the saying goes, just as much a character. Director Albert Shin (2014’s “In Her Place”), who co-wrote the script with James Schultz, crafts an enticing, David Lynchian mood with authentic local color and sprinkles plenty of breadcrumbs or possible blind alleys for his deceptive, wolf-crying Nancy Drew to chase. If successfully solving the mystery at hand falls on the anticlimactic side and turns out to be almost beside the point, “Disappearance at Clifton Hill” is more of a winding, meandering journey about righting the wrongs of the past and the blurry line between memory and truth.

When Abby (Tuppence Middleton) returns to her tourist hometown in Niagara Falls to deal with the sale of her recently deceased mother’s rundown motel, she is haunted by a 25-year-old memory from when she was seven years old. In 1994 on a family fishing trip, Abby witnessed something she wasn’t supposed to see: a 13-year-old boy with an injured eye being violently kidnapped by a couple. Abby only ever told her younger sister, Laure (Hannah Gross), who still lives in town and works in security at a casino, but Laure knows her sister to be a habitual liar. As soon as Abby finds a photo dating back to the day of the kidnapping, it triggers a fire in her to obsessively piece together the unsolved mystery. With the help of local historian and podcaster Walter Bell (David Cronenberg, in front of the camera for a change), Abby has her theories and a list of suspects. 

“Disappearance at Clifton Hill” opens with the unnerving memory of Abby coming face to face with the soon-to-be-kidnapped boy, who gestures to her to keep quiet, and then returning to her family for a photo, unable to process what she has just seen. As adult Abby’s amateur sleuthing unfolds, the film has to spin its wheels a bit with all the colorful characters, weird settings, and red herrings she comes across in a town of smoke and mirrors. Abby clashes with a local hotshot developer (Eric Johnson), tracks a volatile gambler (Elizabeth Saunders), who treats her incapacitated husband like a prisoner, and takes to the U.S. side of the falls to find the parents of “the one-eyed boy,” a husband-and-wife magic act known as the Magnificent Moulins (Paulino Nunes, Marie-Josée Croze). Where this all eventually leads in the literal last minute of the film will make Abby a bit more clear-eyed and give her more comfort than resolution. Tuppence Middleton (2019's "Downton Abbey") makes for an engaging, resourceful, if unreliable guide as Abby, and the film has a couple of genuinely tense moments, particularly a confrontation in a diner with the magicians, and a haunting jazz score by Alex Sowinski and Leland Whitty (members of instrumental group BadBadNotGood). A few notches below the intoxicating spells cast by other recent notable neo-noirs—Aaron Katz’s “Gemini” and David Robert Mitchell’s “Under the Silver Lake”—Albert Shin’s “Disappearance at Clifton Hill” still beguiles with its own similarly drifty, atmospheric pleasures. 

Grade: B -

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