THE VANISHING
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1991 Frank Maloney
THE VANISHING is a Franco-Dutch film directed by George Sluizer, adapted by Tim Krapp'e from his own novel, and starring Gene Bervoets (Rex), Johanna Ter Steegel (Saskia), and Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu (Raymond).
THE VANISHING is a thriller in which a woman suddenly, inexplicably, and unaccountably disappears. That much is rather familiar territory, at least since Hitchcock's wonderful THE LADY VANISHES began delighting and frightening us 55 years ago or so. The questions of how did it happen, why, and by whose agency are pretty much the standard ones is this particular subgenre. Here Sluizer efficiently disposes of these in reverse order starting early on into the film. We get to see the events leading up to the vanishing first as they relate to the young Dutch couple on holiday in the South of France and then we begin again with the bad guy and the long road to leads ultimately to the vanishing.
Predestination is a theme here. Dreams, signs, and defying fate are the engine that moves all the major characters.
After a fight, Rex promises Saskia never to abandon her again. After Saskia vanishes at a French service station, Rex becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to her. If there is horror in this movie, it is the arbitrariness and accidental nature of life. The bad guy, Raymond, wants to find out how bad he really is; incredibly Raymond is something of klutz, an awkward, unconvincing, subtly alarming stalker of women and it takes a long time and lots of practice and failures before providence or shall we call it accidence gives him the victim he wants.
In the end, Sluizer leaves only the question of how to the end. I would rather he had not. The penultimate scene would have been better left on the cutting room floor. The film does not really answer the question of why because it ultimately posits an arbitrary world in which motivation is irrelevant. Therefore, how becomes mere tidiness. Without that the how being tidied, we would have been left with a delicious, savory mystery, rather as we were in PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK.
Still, the performances are uniformly fine, if not especially showy. The character of Raymond is the most interesting and subtly acted; but then the devil always gets the best lines. This particular devil is rather funny at times with his clumsiness and endless scribbling of notations and timings. Sinister, of course, but also a smug bourgeois lecturer and family man. A man driven by mechanism you and I can barely fathom, but also a man who spills on himself.
I enjoyed THE VANISHING despite the weak ending and can recommend it to anyone who isn't put off by subtitles, subtlety, no music telling us when we're scared, or low budgets.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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