Disappearance at Clifton Hill

Year: 2019

Actors: David Cronenberg, Tuppence Middleton, Hannah Gross, Eric Johnson

Duration: 100 min

In the opening sequence, Abby, a seven-year-old girl, while walking around the woods by the water, sees a boy with an eyepatch being attacked by two adults and stuffed into a car trunk. It happens just up the hill and through the weeds of where she is standing, but it's clear enough. While her oblivious family takes a group picture minutes later, she sees the car drive away.Twenty - five years later, Abby remains haunted by what she saw, and possibly also deeply damaged. Abby is regarded as a pathological liar, capable of concocting fantastical stories and black sheep of her family, but she reluctantly returns to her eccentric hometown to help her sister settle the affairs of their late mother. This includes finalizing the sale of her mom's rundown motel to the richest family in town.While overseeing the family hotel in its last few weeks of ownership, Abby starts to retrace the steps of this unfinished story that her sister Laure considered to be just one of Abby's fantastical yarns. But it's not long before Abby finds different pieces that guide her more and more to the event, starting with finding out the name of the boy who disappeared. The locals believe that the boy committed suicide. When revisiting the site of disappearance, she meets Walter who scuba dives for stuff that finds its way from the falls, oversees a UFO-themed café and has a conspiracy podcast that has been talking about the events Abby has been fixated on. A visit to the library and a few conversations later, Abby discovers a VHS tape promoting a mother and father magician duo known as the Magnificent Moulins, a tiger and a report of their son committing suicide. Their son looked exactly like the missing boy. Abby wonders why was it deemed a suicide if the police never recovered the boy's (Alex) body from the gorge. Abby also reveals to her sister Laure that back in Toronto she checked into a facility after her constant lying lead eventually to break-up with her boyfriend.While doing her own diving into the story, she encounters a guy who claims to own the town, Charlie Lake III. Plainly sleazy and pushy right off the bat, he wants to buy the Rainbow Hotel that Abby's mother owned, and Abby wants more information about his father's possible involvement with Alex's disappearance. Laure who works at a casino helps Abby get more information about Bev Mole (Moulin's assistant) who could be complicit in Alex's disappearance.On the pretext of inviting her back to casino, Abby has Bev visit her motel. Bev's paralyzed husband reveals to Abby that Alex was injured/mauled by the tiger during the magicians' act and was asked to be hidden away by Moulins. Bev and he tried to blackmail the Moulins in return for their silence on Alex's mistreatment. Only one day Alex runs away and Bev is forced to find him and take him back to Moulins but then he is never heard from again. All this leads Abby to believe that Moulins killed their own kid.Abby confronts the Moulins after their show one day. She uses her sister's passport to cross the border into United States. For good measure, the two magicians share their side of the story, but with a lie and a truth, letting Abby figure out which is which. The husband says that Alex was supposed to be taken to their farm but Bev never took him there and police later told them that the boy committed suicide. He believes that Charles Lake II had Alex murdered. The wife says that Alex was a weak kid and probably saw suicide as a means to escape the torture of being in a cage with the tiger. While crossing the border back to Canada, she is caught by the border security.While in custody, Laure is informed that Abby had been in Arizona, Phoenix for the past 18 months and pretended to have retrograde amnesia, trying to get the state to issue her an Id. But she was discovered and disbarred from entering US again. Her mom helped rescue Abby and had been paying for all legal formalities via a loan against the sale of the motel.Abby tracks down Bev and her husband who is routinely abused by Bev and convinces him to reveal the truth about Alex. The police arrests Charles Lake 3, for molestation and murder of Alex and the Moulins along with Bev for torture.Shortly, Abby comes across a one-eyed man checking into a hotel, where she is now a receptionist. Upon watching Charles Lakes III's picture in the headlines, he reveals to Abby that Charles is in fact not a bad guy and that he saved the boy's life.

Genre: Action   Drama   Mystery   Thriller