Mark Reviews Movies: DISAPPEARANCE AT CLIFTON HILL

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 27, 2020

If a person lies too often and for a considerable period of time, he or she might start to believe the lies. It's also possible, perhaps, that the person might forget what the truth was in the first place. That's the predicament of Abby (Tuppence Middleton), a pathological liar who finds herself caught up in a mystery, in which decades of lies—none of them her own, for once it seems—are examined and unraveled.

Abby, the troubled and sometimes troubling protagonist of Disappearance at Clifton Hill, becomes an amateur sleuth, trying to figure out what happened to a young boy about 20 years ago. She remembers seeing the boy, who was about her age, in the woods, while on a camping trip with her family. She remembers his face—most notably that he wore a bloodied bandage of over one eye.

She recalls how he shushed her, because a pair of people in a car on a nearby road were looking for him. She recalls that the two strangers heard her, when she dropped a bucket with a fish in it, and how the boy ran. Abby mostly remembers that the boy was grabbed, fought back, and was hit with a metal rod, before being stuffed in the trunk of that car.

This scene is, as far as we can tell, the truth of what happened this boy, whose death was later ruled a suicide, even though no body was ever recovered. Abby has lived with this memory. She didn't tell anyone, except for her younger sister Laure (Hannah Gross), who didn't believe it at the time. Abby had many stories as a kid—fantastical tales about things little and big. After enough of those fibs, Laure just started to assume that all of them, including the story about the one-eyed boy, were made up—an older sister's teasing, trying to show off, or just playing a game with her younger sibling.

The lies grew as Abby got older, and that's where we find her at the start of co-writer/director Albert Shin's film. After the death of the sisters' mother, Abby has returned to her hometown of Niagara Falls, Ontario, following decades of being on her own under unknown circumstances. We know for certain that Laure still doesn't believe her older sister and that Abby, even after having her lies called out for most of her life, still doesn't give people any reason to believe her.

Shin and co-screenwriter James Schultz have given us a most unique detective—a woman who is so adept at lying that, in theory, she knows better than almost anyone when someone else is obfuscating the truth or just making up some B.S. The mystery, which involves a local company that holds much sway over this city and a pair of married magicians and a tiger trainer with jet-black hair, is strange enough to hold our attention, even if the screenwriters' seem to be spinning their wheels after a certain amount of information comes to light. The amateur detective, who desperately wants to prove to others and even to herself that at least one thing about her life is the absolute and irrevocable truth, is the element of the film that keeps us involved.

Abby and Laure's family ran a motel, which once thrived from the constant tourism of the city, but then came the bigger hotels and the casinos. Before she died, the sisters' widowed mother negotiated a sale with Charlie Lake (Eric Johnson), the third-generation owner of a local property-development company. Laure, now married and with a steady security job at a casino, wants to follow through with the sale. Abby doesn't and makes a home there.

Meanwhile, the memories of the kidnapped boy from so many years ago return. Abby tells the local police, who don't believe her (It doesn't help that she lied to a new-in-town cop, played by Andy McQueen, after bringing him back to the motel from a bar). Laure still doesn't believe her, but after some basic research (She says she studied journalism, but can we know for sure?) and with the help of a local historian/podcaster (played by filmmaker David Cronenberg, in an amusing bit of casting), Abby convinces her sister that something foul may be afoot.

To be clear, the mystery here does matter. Shin and Schultz put forth some nasty possibilities—such a trained tiger, a potential case of filicide, and a wealthy and ruthless man possibly covering up for the moral sins and legal crimes of his son—perpetrated or overseen by some compelling, offbeat characters.

There's Charlie, for one, who seems like a decent-enough family man and a tough-but-fair businessman, although the podcaster has his theories, and there's also the black-haired woman (played by Elizabeth Sanders), who ran off after some trouble at the casino and now keeps her husband/partner-in-crime (played by Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) as a prisoner of sorts. As for those magicians, the parents of the kidnapped boy, they're the Magnificent Moulins (Paulino Nunes and Marie-Josée Croze), who took their act to the U.S. side of the falls. They make their living in deceit with smoke and mirrors, and even a devoted deceiver like Abby can't keep up with such professionalism.

Such games—between an amateur liar and some potentially criminal ones—give this little mystery, which doesn't reveal its answers until the final minute, a notable kick. While those games also come to define Abby's unique qualifications as a sleuth, it's her need to find one true thing about her life, defined by so many lies and deceptions, that gives Disappearance at Clifton Hill a sense of desperate momentum.

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