Horrorfest 2010: The Vanishing

Now here's a really good one -- THE VANISHING, proof the Dutch can do horror. Even though it's mostly in French.

THE VANISHING plays on one of the most common fears: the idea that a loved one could just disappear, seemingly into thin air, at any moment. The fear is so common, most people don't even think about it. It's the kind of thing that only really enters your mind when your heart suddenly turns cold and drops into your stomach when you realize someone isn't where they're supposed to be, or they're taking a little longer than you think they should be, or. . . and then, if you're lucky, they suddenly pop up and everything is fine and you instantly forget how scared you were.

THE VANISHING is about what happens when the loved one doesn't pop up and it turns out everything is not fine, and your heart stays cold. In this case, we have a young married couple traveling through France on vacation. They stop at a busy gas station / rest stop, leave each others' sight for a brief moment, and never see each other again. Rex (Gene Bervoets) searches the truck stop in vain, but his wife Saskia (Johanna ter Steege) is nowhere to be found.

One interesting thing about THE VANISHING is that it is not really a mystery about what happened. I mean, it is, and it isn't. See, very early on, we get glimpses of a suspicious creep trying on a fake cast and suspiciously loitering around the rest stop. It's fairly clear that this is the guy responsible for Saskia's disappearance, so we know pretty early on that it's definitely foul play and not some strange conspiracy.

In fact, shortly after the opening passages focusing on the married couple, the film switches tracks and begins to focus on this creep, who turns out to be an academic family man, Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu). We start to figure out that the movie has jumped back in time and is now showing us Lemorne's intricate preparations to satisfy his overwhelming desire to kidnap a woman and do God knows what to one. This is some of the most interesting stuff in the movie, as Lemorne meticulously, and sometimes pathetically, plots out his crime. It's chilling to watch as he dispassionately role plays the act of tricking a strange woman into his car, first by himself and later by using his unwitting daughter as a prop, and finally as he fails on several clumsy attempts to act his plan out.

Meanwhile, 3 years after the disappearance, Rex has devoted his entire life to finding out what happened to Saskia. He's broken hearted, sure, but he's also simply obsessed with the mystery. You get the feeling that even though he loves Saskia, he'd almost rather simply know what happened to her than actually find her alive. Lemorne sees the "missing" signs around town and catches an interview with Rex on TV, and becomes obsessed as well -- with the idea of having the power to "show" what he did with Saskia to Rex. He starts sending postcards to arrange for a meeting.

So begins the third act of the film, which, of course, I can't give away, except to say that it features a battle of wills and wits between Lemorne and Rex as they finally meet and discuss what happened that day at the rest stop, how it happened, why it happened, and what Saskia's fate was, all leading to a nightmarish ending.

Most of the power of the movie lies in the suspense -- you want to know what happened to Saskia, even though you basically already know. I mean, she was clearly kidnapped by Lemorne and disposed of in some way. But how and why? Those details gnaw at you, just like the gnaw at Rex. And, even as we're introduced to Lemorne, his sociopathic behavior continues to fascinate, confuse and intrigue.

The sad truth is, there are some actions that can never really be explained, beyond blaming it on a chemical imbalance or mental disease -- the wiring goes wrong at some point. But, that same wiring is designed to make humans intellectually curious, and gives humans the desire to try to connect the dots and find motivations.

In the first shot of the film we see a stick bug, expertly blending in to its surroundings. In the last shot, we see a preying mantis, born to hunt. So, like the basest critters on the face of the Earth, mankind struggles on in an eternal game of hide and seek -- hiding from ourselves, and seeking ourselves.