Review: Spoorloos (The Vanishing) (1988)

George Sluizer's The Vanishing is a film told with all the patience of a good joke. It slowly, gradually builds itself up a little head of steam, before unleashing the final punchline, which in this case is one of the most chilling, not to mention plausible, endings of any movie. Though the movie is essentially 100 minutes of dialogue and very little action, Sluizer still finds a way to keep all of it entertaining, if not engaging, and the end result is a solid little thriller with a shocking finale that gets under your skin and stays there.

Gene Bervoets and Johanna ter Steege play Rex Hofman and Saskia Wagter, respectively, a vacationing couple who stop at a busy gas station on the way to their intended destination. There, Saskia decides to go to the restroom and pick up a few things while Rex waits outside. She never returns. Rex shows off her picture to a few workers inside the station and finds a shocking truth--that she was last scene exiting the store with another man.

That other man is Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), a seemingly normal family man who has a wife and two kids of his own. But there is definitely more than meets the eye, and it quickly becomes apparent that Raymond is a sociopath. He rents out a house roughly sixteen miles away from his home, and it is here that he begins carrying out plans to abduct a young woman. These scenes are relatively brilliant; the attention-to-detail is just about phenomenal. Most movies just show a killer go through his routine as if it is just that; that is partially what makes The Vanishing, or perhaps more specifically, Raymond's character, so chilling. We see him test out an anesthetic on himself first, timing his unconsciousness so he knows roughly how long his victim will be out. He also tests his pulse after failed abductions, and we can see the results. This isn't just a cardboard cutout of a killer that so many movies like to shove at us, this is someone that you could bump into at a supermarket, have a casual conversation with, and never even suspect that anything could be wrong. In fact, it makes a fairly strong case that you probably have come in contact with a murderer before, and never even knew it.

Three years have passed since the abduction, but Rex still wants to find what happened to his lover; it is no longer out of curiosity, but out of obsession. He has interviews on television asking the kidnapper to contact him and tell him what happened, and even continues to put posters up all over the city begging anyone for any kind of information. Occasionally over the last couple years, he has received postcards that are supposedly from Raymond, telling him to show up at a certain spot and he will make himself known. Rex always shows up, knows the kidnapper is probably watching him, but Raymond never shows himself.

Finally, Raymond catches up to Rex on a busy street and gives him a proposition: If Rex will go to France with him, he will tell him everything. After an initial angry outburst in which he beats Raymond, Rex reluctantly agrees; his curiosity is far too great to pass up the opportunity he has fought for three years to obtain. Once in France, Raymond has an even more startling proposition: In order to find out exactly what happened, he must go through the same things that Saskia went through. If she died, then so will he, in the exact same fashion. So consumed is he with knowing the truth, that he accepts Raymond's offer.

The Vanishing is a film that works on so many levels, where things are slowly revealed to us as the film moves along. Just about every frame within the film is either a foreshadowing of a future event, or the end result of a previous foreshadowing. Take, for instance, an early scene where their car runs out of gas in a darkened tunnel at night. Rex decides to leave Saskia there all alone while he goes to get gas. When he returns, she is gone, but it is quickly revealed that she is waiting for him right outside the tunnel all along. This sequence not only foreshadows her permanent disappearance that will occur later on that same day, but also becomes heartbreaking when she makes Rex promise he will never leave her again.

Perhaps it is that promise that drives Rex over the edge, that will not allow him to rest until he knows the absolute truth, even if it will end up killing him. He has promised to never leave her, yet allows her to be abducted right in front of his face, in broad daylight; the guilt has perhaps become too much to bear. In the end, the film seems to argue that Rex may be just as insane as Raymond, though of course on slightly different levels; Raymond may take lives, but Rex is willing to give his up just to find out the irreversible truth; he feels there is nothing worse than not knowing what happened to his lover. In the end, he may get more than he bargained for.

Rating: * * * 1/2 (out of 4)