lizlie2001 Spoilers: Your husband dresses like a young boy, builds forts in the woods and you blithely look out your window and ring a bell when supper is ready??? Your child disappears and you don't contact your wife immediately but wait until you're driven home by the police?? You apparently don't work but can afford an huge upscale flat or are we supposed to believe a children's book writer in this day and age can live off royalties??? Or an apparently friendless woman teaching a few hours a week and giving piano lessons can afford a killer stand alone cottage on a large Kent property?. Oh dear. I am someone who cries over diaper commercials but nothing in this contrived out of touch melodrama touched me in any way. Each character was an upper class white Brit - devoid of passion. Everyone said their lines appropriately but what was happening underneath?? Nothing. I kept on hoping it would get better. It didn't. When it ended in a barren hospital room with no monitoring equipment and a woman valiantly giving birth without aid of drugs, I wondered if this script had been written in the '50

kirstywalters77 I never write reviews on here but for god sake, these 'people' apparently had a child abducted(or whatever) No emotion, no good connection between Cumberbatch and McDonald! Offensive to those who have lost children and as another reviewer commented, they may as well of lost a dog or cat... pathetic, offensive and please if you have lost a child, don't bloody watch it it!!!!!! No police, no real investigation... posters?! disgrace!

paul-1184 I was at a total loss virtually from the start of this movie. By the end, I was offended by the lack of respect shown to families who've lost a child, and those who've suffered mental illness. Quite an achievement in less than 90 minutes. A child goes missing. An unthinkable situation for any parent, and for those that have lost a child (whether taken or through them passing) it's of course utterly traumatising. Having supported friends who did lose a child, there were of course periods where they appeared to live life as normal, but for at least two years the overwhelming emotions were deep grief and panic. This film however seemed to suggest it was less upsetting than having lost your dog - i've seen more emotion shown by friends frantically looking for their pet than was shown by the parents of this lost child. They instead seemed to experience virtually no emotion or grief at all for the majority of the film, and instead just got on with their lives. This is not only totally unrealistic, it is offensive to families who've actually been through this. Then, to add insult to injury, they also throw in there the complex and devastating problems of mental illness and suicide. Losing a child is clearly not a deep enough subject through which to explore the complexities of human emotion, let's add this to the mix as well!?! So, all in all, a film that totally fails to convey the difficulty and emotion caused by these deeply traumatic experiences. Avoid.

jc-osms What a strange TV film this was and I have to say I didn't get it at all. The big story was the abduction of a well-connected London couple's four year old daughter whilst out shopping with her father, played hand-wringingly seriously by Benedict Cumberbatch. There's never any doubt at all that she will ever be found and so the piece becomes an extended study in grief and loss and its effect on the relationship between the parents. But there's another altogether stranger story intermixed into the plot as Cumberbatch's best friend and publisher, the Prime Minister's spin doctor, approaching burn-out, gives up his city and Westminster life to retreat with his devoted wife to the country but where instead of recharging his batteries he regresses to his childhood on his way to a nervous breakdown and beyond.I just wasn't convinced by any of it. Cumberbatch and his wife, played by Kelly MacDonald separate after their daughter's disappearance but in their first meeting in months inevitably end up in bed. Both of them seem to have visions of children in their midst, culminating in Cumberbatch's big breakdown scene when he mistakes a young schoolgirl for his Katie and finally realises in the process that she's never coming back.There are a number of peripheral characters who flit in and out of the narrative like the female teacher who befriends Cumberbatch while they attend a Commons Committee on children's education and his mother who witters on about imagining her unborn son being present at a small-town bar before she'd even conceived him.There's plenty more of that kind of weirdness, like the suspicious behaviour of the Prime Minister and Home Secretary over their aide's dropping out, said aide's running about the countryside in short trousers like he's on "The Coral Island", Cumberbatch's aforementioned teacher friend who cuts her head en route to his house and nosily discovers his untouched "shrine" to his absent daughter...I wasn't convinced by the situations portrayed or the back and forth treatment of time which I found tricksy and confusing. As for the performances, you could literally see Cumberbatch and McDonald acting and not very impressively at that, while in the writing, I found nothing credible in what was depicted with the dialogue falling unnaturally from everyone's lips.And as for the restorative, I won't go quite so far as to say happy, ending, it's entirely predictable and wholly unconvincing.I don't know, maybe it was adapted from one of those impossible-to-dramatise modern novels, I hear about. All I know is that I wasn't moved or touched by anything I saw in this production and frequently looked away from the screen in embarrassment at the gaucheness I was witnessing.