Disappearance at Clifton Hill

After her mother dies, Abby returns to Niagara Falls to deal with her family’s run-down motel. As a child, she saw a boy with an injured eye dragged into a car, but her family did not trust her because she often lied. Abby starts digging into the old case while her sister wants to sell the motel and a rich local family presses for the deal. The film uses empty tourist streets, strange side characters, dark humor, and dreamlike mystery to create an uneasy, twisted tone.

The film gives its central detective role to a troubled woman and also makes her sister a major part of the story. Abby’s search shows how a woman’s claims can be dismissed, and the film lets her push past men who doubt her, but it also shows her as a liar whose memory may be wrong. The story does not turn her into a perfect hero, since her choices are selfish, reckless, and tied to her need to make herself part of a great mystery. Its main ideas are memory, trauma, family guilt, childhood harm, local power, and the way a tourist town hides its darker past. The female-led viewpoint is noticeable, but identity politics is not the film’s main subject.