The Vanishing Movie Review
The Vanishing is one of the saddest, most chilling movies ever made. The first part of the plot focuses on a young Dutch couple embarking on a holiday. Their relationship has slid into one of easy intimacy. They talk of inconsequentials, they bicker, they get separated for part of an evening because of car trouble. We learn that Saskia (charmingly portrayed by Johanna Ter Steege) is frightened of the dark and that Rex (played with intensity by Gene Bervoetes) tends to be dogged once he's started on a course of action. When they are reunited, they snap at each other, make up quickly, and resume their holiday with fresh enthusiasm. They stop at an all-purpose rest station and she runs an errand. They play on the lawn. These unstressed details will haunt both the audience and Rex the protagonist when he later searches for Saskia. She is like a playful, endearing kitten, and we begin to wish that the mystery of the film would fully engage them both, that maybe they would discover buried treasure together. Instead, the mystery haunts and torments Rex, and stakes a terrifying claim on our imaginations. I haven't been this spooked by a film with such understated visual information since I first caught up with the films of Val Lewton on the late, late show. The Vanishing shows us things that we don't fully understand until several reels later. They work extremely well as individual sequences, but when we finally realize what we've actually seen long after the fact, the initial panic and underlying sadness are incredibly powerful. Screenwriter Tim Krabbe and director George Sluizer obviously knew exactly what they were doing. Like the protagonist, you may find yourself replaying similar episodes in your own life, and you may also overidentify with Rex's obsession for real answers as he pursues Saskia. In any event, it'll be impossible to predict your exact response to the film's startling conclusion or to its final visual tag. After making Utz in Great Britain, Sluizer was lured by Fox to America to duplicate his indie success in 1993, but the studio insisted on a happy ending, infuriating admirers of the classic original. Sluizer then began the ill-fated Dark Blood with Jonathan Pryce and River Phoenix, a film left unfinished when Phoenix died on Halloween, 1993. AKA: Spoorloos.
1988 107m/C NL FR Barnard Pierre Donnadieu, Johanna Ter Steege, Gene Bervoets, Gwen Eckhaus, Bernadette Le Sache, Tania Latarjet, Lucille Glenn, Roger Souza; D: George Sluizer; W: George Sluizer, Tim Krabbe; C: Toni Kuhn; M: Henny Vrienten. VHS, DVD