Vanished Review

A gorgeous couple is on a romantic getaway in France. Often separated by work – he works with refugee resettlement and she is an archeologist – they’ve managed to meet up in Paris and are about to embark on a trip to the South of France (Arles, to be exact). Only something goes terribly wrong. When he goes to take a work call in another car of the train (they’re seated in the Quiet Car, of course), he suddenly vanishes. And the train makes a sudden, unscheduled stop. Now it’s up to her to figure out where he went – and, perhaps, who he really is.

Sounds like a heck of compelling mystery thriller, no? And if I tell you that the couple is played by none other than Kaley Cuoco (as Alice, tapping into the skills she learned during her successful stint on HBO’s The Flight Attendant*) and Sam Claflin (as Tom, another in a string of mysterious men hiding a secret that Claflin is really great at playing), it would likely entice you even more. But here’s the rub. Vanished has all the right pieces in place – actors who know what they’re doing with these types of characters, a gorgeous setting, a solid hook to draw us into the story. What is doesn’t have, however, is an arc that works.

Cuoco is playing a similar character here to the one she played on The Flight Attendant – a normal person who gets swept up into a very abnormal set of circumstances. She’s great at playing someone who cannot get out of her own way and who keeps screwing up even when she’s doing the “right thing.” I’d love to see her in more of these types of roles – just with a better script than this one ends up being.

I know I often harp on how shows have too many episodes and not enough story to fill them. Saying a show is two or three episodes too long is a common gripe of TV critics these days. But Vanished has the opposite problem. Clocking in at a mere four episodes – all under an hour in run time – there’s hardly any time to develop any of these characters beyond the most basic bare-bones storytelling. And the story itself? It’s so incredibly rushed that you have to suspend your disbelief to accept that anyone could have investigated this missing persons case and figured out each of the clues at breakneck speed to reach the end. As for that ending – which I won’t spoil here – it’s also so short and unsatisfying that I couldn’t quite believe that was the end of things.

The plot feels like someone put together a thriller Mad Libs, slotting in motivation and twists at random. When one of the show’s biggest twists occurs and a character explained their role in everything, I straight-up laughed because the writing had done absolutely nothing to ground that revelation in reality. And, outside of Alice and Tom, we’re presented with several other stereotypical characters for this kind of tale. There’s the sympathetic work colleague of Tom’s (Matthias Schweighöfer), who provides key character exposition to Alice when she needs it. The disgraced journalist (Karin Viard), who teams up with Alice after revealing she has some key information on Tom – setting up a brief, fun buddy arc for Cuoco and Viard that is more interesting that the story they’re chasing. And finally, the detective (Simon Abkarian), who is suspicious of Alice’s claims about Tom’s disappearance.

All the pieces are there in Vanished. It could have been a fun thriller, with characters running through Marseilles, trying to figure out just where Tom is and why he left. I had some high hopes for it at the start. But the pacing is so off, the story is so choppy, and the characters never get the chance to show us who they are beyond the most surface level. If you’re in the mood for a thriller, this isn’t it.
Vanished premieres February 1 on MGM+. All four episodes were provided for review.