Review: Disappearance at Clifton Hill (2019)

Albert Shin strikes gold by setting Disappearance at Clifton Hill in Niagara Falls, the seedy, touristy city on the border of Canada and the United States and situated beside the world-famous waterfalls. It’s an excellent setting for a neo-noir, with the socioeconomic conditions necessary to make a plot of conspiracy, subterfuge, and rotting institutions work. All of this makes Disappearance at Clifton Hill one of the more pleasant surprises in Canadian cinema of the last few years.

The film begins back in the early 1990s when Abby is just a girl with her parents on the banks of the Niagara River. She wanders off to fill up her bucket with freshwater and ends up witnessing what seems to be a kidnapping, as two strange-looking adults accost and make away with a boy with an eye patch. Flashforward to the present day and Abby (played by Tuppence Middleton as an adult) is on the bus back to Niagara Falls after her mother’s death to help clear up the affairs of the rundown motel her mother owned on the Clifton Hill tourist strip in town. Her sister, Laure (Hannah Gross), who still lives in town and works at one of the casinos, wants to sell to the local business barons, the Charles Lake Company, but Abby wants to keep the hotel as a totem to her childhood.

Abby’s return to Niagara triggers her memories of the kidnapping and she starts to investigate what could’ve happened to the one-eyed boy. Did she witness a kidnapping? Did she imagine it? The answer may lie in between, as we learn over the course of the film that Abby struggles with various personality disorders and has a history of fabrication and manipulation. The confused, traumatized protagonist coming up against a possible conspiracy is a hallmark of film noir, so it’s not contrived for the film to follow an unreliable protagonist. Same goes for the convoluted plotting, which I outlined above. It’s intricate, for sure, but the complication is a part of the overall approach and a means of creating a pervasive atmosphere of mystery. And the atmosphere is the best part about Disappearance at Clifton Hill.

Anyone who has visited Niagara Falls in the evening will have seen the seedy motels and decaying neon signs of Clifton Hill, where funhouses, arcades, and murky bars promise an escape from reality. Shin, who grew up in Niagara Falls, understands that it’s a town made of smoke and mirrors. He sets scenes in funhouses, where mirrors warp our vision of what’s happening on screen, or in round restaurants made up to look like flying saucers, where we can never properly get our bearings on the geography of the location. When he does shoot the humdrum parts of the town, like the motel that Abby’s mother owned, he always has the casino tower looming over the frame in the background, reminding us that all going-ons in the town serve the casino and the levers of capital. Through shooting and blocking, he either masks the presentation of the setting or clarifies the ominous shadow hanging over everything. It’s a smart approach to the material and shows a keen understanding of how shot construction and blocking can suggest political meaning.

The mystery itself is distinctly Canadian, meaning slight and downmarket. There are no cabals of global elites pulling the strings, but instead a mini-dynasty of real estate barons that run the town like they were governors of a remote colony. The people involved in the conspiracy are stage magicians, casino employees, and a local podcaster memorably played by Canadian icon David Cronenberg.

Cronenberg’s presence is not only catnip for cinephile viewers, but thematically clarifying, as Disappearance at Clifton Hill draws on some of the same anxieties present in Cronenberg’s work, namely, the anxiety borne out of the distinctly Canadian belief that institutions and organizations are corrupt, but also essential to maintaining order; Canadians may not like institutions or power brokers, but they fear the chaos unleashed in their absence more than their all-consuming control. The film’s troubling ending doubles-down on this approach, as the mystery may be solved, but the power structure holding everything in place may have been upset, with the potential to unleash chaos down the line.

Thus, Disappearance at Clifton Hill is not just moody, but substantial in its commentary on how power operates in Canada. The film is still a quintessentially Canadian indie. For instance, it is not seamlessly shot—some scenes are swallowed up by shadow in ways that are more muddy than evocative—and some of the performances are stilted. But Albert Shin has a conviction in his material and what it says about this country that makes up for any of its deficiencies in production.

7 out of 10

Disappearance at Clifton Hill (2019, Canada)

Directed by Albert Shin; written by Albert Shin and James Schultz; starring Tuppence Middleton, Hannah Gross, David Cronenberg, Marie-Josee Croze, Andy McQueen, Noah Reid, Dan Lett, Aaron Poole, Connor Jessup, Elizabeth Saunders, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos.

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