Girl in the Picture: get obsessed with the Netflix true crime doc

Abducted in Plain Sight was a dark story of child abuse and paedophilia that had true crime fans gripped to their seats. Returning to Netflix is a new and even more shocking documentary feature by the same creator. Girl in the Picture is top of Netflix’s most watched movies list, with a story that follows the abduction and murder of another girl – except this time, the victim’s identity is a mystery. As detailed in the synopsis, the story “unfolds like a nightmare” – strap in.

In 1990, a woman was found in critical condition at the roadside in what seemed to be a classic case of hit-and-run. She died five days later in hospital, and was identified as Tonya Hughes: a sex worker who was married to a man named ‘Clarence’. Eventually, it was discovered he was a fugitive, Franklin Delano Ffloyd.

Tonya’s six-year-old son Michael was taken in by the authorities. Floyd turned up at his school and kidnapped his step son after threatening the headmaster with a gun. Now the police had both a murder and an abduction case to deal with, which didn’t take long to be picked up by the media. It got even more complicated when some viewers recognised Tonya as an entirely different person altogether. This is where it gets crazy – a story of multiple identities, kidnapping, pregnancy, and shocking murder with a rollercoaster of twists and turns.

“I think with crime there’s a lot that you have to balance. There’s the sensitivity that you have to balance but there’s a lot of ethics to balance,” Skye Borgman, the movie’s director, said in an interview with HorrorBuzz earlier this year. “All of the different genres have unique challenges [but] within the crime space that sensitivity exists from the very beginning.”

The emotional rollercoaster that is Girl in the Picture has created the biggest buzz on the true crime scene since The Tinder Swindler. There is much, much more to the story that you’ll have to watch for yourself to believe.

“Girl in the picture on Netflix is one of the craziest documentaries I have seen. She was failed on so many different levels, it's just so heartbreaking. So so very heartbreaking,” says one Twitter user.

It’s been described as “horrific” and “sickening” in equal measure, with many pointing to the painfully timely themes it has on abortion, as another Twitter user said: “30 minutes in to “The Girl in the Picture on Netflix… bitch I'm crying. Netflix knew what they were doing to women releasing this after Roe v. Wade.”

Check the trailer below, then join in the horrified, rave reviews too.