Disappearance at Clifton Hill(2020)

Plot Summary

• 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.

Storyline

• When Abby ( Tuppence Middleton ) returns to her hometown of Niagara Falls after her mother dies, she becomes obsessed with a fragmented memory from her childhood, a kidnapping she believes she was witness to. She is reunited with her estranged younger sister, Laure ( Hannah Gross ), and they attempt to settle their mother's estate involving the sale of the family motel, but Abby's compulsive desire to reconcile her past grows increasingly out of control. Albert Shin 's latest is an intense and taut psychological thriller that exposes the seedy underbelly of structural systems through the point of view of its dynamic female protagonists. Middleton delivers a stellar and complex performance as a woman obsessed with her troubled past while trying to uncover a crime to which she's convinced she was an accomplice. Shin and co-writer James Schultz craft a sharp, suspenseful drama, equipped with twists and turns, culminating with a climax that will leave you thinking for days. — Toronto International Film Festival After a long absence, Abby returns to her hometown of Niagara Falls, ON on the death of her mother, her estate going to Abby and her younger sister Laure, who works in security at the Niagara Falls Casino. While their mother was in the process of selling their "home", what is now the rundown Rainbow Inn, a motel, Abby, against Laure's wishes, wants to keep it at least for the time being in Abby wanting to see if she/they can operate it. Abby's return also brings up remembrances of when she was seven years old when she, while the family was picnicking in a nearby remote area, secretly witnessed a seemingly abused one-eyed boy she encountered being abducted i.e. beaten and thrown unwillingly into the trunk of a car by two adults. While she had cursorily mentioned the incident to a few people at the time, she was dismissed in she routinely talking fancifully. Indeed, Abby, as an adult, has lived a life of lies. When she comes upon some evidence that the boy's disappearance may be connected to the Charles Lake Company (CLC), a family business now headed by its third generation, Charles Lake III, which controls much of Niagara Falls and which was the interested purchaser of the Rainbow Inn, Abby decides to investigate on her own in she again being dismissed by the police when she brings her concerns to them, potentially at risk to her own life if she gets too close to the truth. — Huggo