I admit I was afraid to watch this. I don't like formulaic movies with predictable characters and storylines. But, as a huge fan of Benedict Cumberbatch, I decided to trust in its worth. I was not disappointed. As a mother of 5 children, having lost one, I was a little on guard and told myself in advance of viewing--don't buy into anything... don't feel... don't fall apart. I was somewhat stoic but as the film progressed and I became attached to the main characters, instead of it causing MY pain of MY loss to well up, instead I felt the whole gamut of emotions of the characters, so realistically and unashamedly and believably portrayed. Don't try to text or work on your computer or do any distracting tasks--you will miss the astonishing beauty of the cinematography and the subtle nuances of the characters and settings--there are several scenes without audible words but these may speak even more loudly.

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

Generally speaking, children don't just disappear off the face of the earth. When a child is reported missing or murdered, parents and people known to the child are routinely investigated as persons of interest because stranger abductions are very rare. Nevertheless stories about missing children have a universal scare element that draws readers and viewers and has been the basis of some memorable films, from the 1975 arthouse classic Picnic at Hanging Rock to the true crime TV film Adam and the feature Without a Trace (both 1983), all of them made well before Ian McEwan published his novel A Child in Time. So he wasn't exploring new thematic territory as much as exploiting a very familiar theme that, if this adaptation is any indication, he didn't really have much interest in and threw away as soon as he'd gotten the reader's attention with it. Like previous reviewers I'm amazed at how quickly the parents give up their seach for their little girl. The nasty rageaholic mother even sneers at the father's attempt to put up posters asking for help--if this were another type of story she would probably turn out to be the murderer. But that's not the point, right? The point is for the filmmakers to make an elegant tone poem in muted colors while the actors do their Bafta best and Ian McEwan scores points using the subject of child abduction as coldly and irresponsibly as he used child rape in Atonement.

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.