George Sluizer
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Filmography
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The theme of disappearance has been attempted by many great directors (Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes),but it has never been done as spookily as it is here.
An art-house hit in 1988 (and re-made in the U.S. by the same director in 1993, with predictably lamentable results), the picture is a chilling reinterpolation of the plot device Hitchcock used in The Lady Vanishes (1938).
Given both archetypes, Sluizer fully embraces them in The Vanishing, and on the surface it's a conventional film with a passionate hero trying to find a lost companion (an archetype readily available from Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, and repeated innumerable times since.)
Broadcast Signal Intrusion (2021)
Directed by Jacob Gentry
influenced by The Vanishing (1988)
Themes
George Sluizer’s The Vanishing (1988, remade 1993) and David Fincher’s similarly Chicago-set Zodiac ( 2007) – both key cinematic reference points for the obsessiveness and paranoia of James’ quest – were notably made, or set, in what now seem historic periods.
As with George Sluizer’s The Vanishing (1993), grief and reason are overpowered by a need to know what happened to a loved one, and it’s a powerful force pushing James and viewers down a bleak and disturbing road.
There's an echo of George Sluizer's great The Vanishing in Mehdi Bajestani's performance, adducing evil by how his unremarkable life contrasts so chillingly with his pathologies.
With this English-language remake of his 2008 Belgian film “Loft,” Erik Van Looy may just have repeated the dubious distinction that George Sluizer achieved with his redoing of his superb thriller “Spoorloos” (1988) as “The Vanishing” five years later: managing to make a movie so disastrously bad that it will kill any chance for a future career in Hollywood.
To make matters worse, original Belgian director Erik Van Looy is behind the lens, more or less offering a shot-for-shot remake of his own original a la George Sluizer and his 1988 film The Vanishing.
Writer-director Ken Scott returns to helm the American version, an act that is not without precedent: George Sluizer and Francis Veber did the same for "The Vanishing" and "Three Fugitives" respectively.
The conclusion conjures up a race against time to save Emily, liberally borrowing elements from George Sluizer’s 1988 shocker “The Vanishing” to bring Poe to a place of disorientation that shadowed his actual death on Baltimore streets in 1849.
In some ways this reminded me of Hitchcock's "Rope" and "Strangers on a Train," about seemingly ordinary people who push themselves to find out just how much they might be capable of, as well as the innocents who become wrapped up in their schemes.
As a general rule, when European directors do English-language remakes of their home-grown successes, the result is pretty dismal; perhaps the most egregious example is “The Vanishing,” Dutch director George Sluizer’s chilling 1988 tale of a man’s obsessive search for his missing girlfriend that he turned into a laughably inept Hollywood bomb five years later.
This remake of his Norwegian crime-thriller “Kraftidioten” (released stateside as “In Order of Disappearance”) about a father avenging his son allows Moland to join the ranks of directors like Michael Haneke (“Funny Games”), George Sluizer (“The Vanishing”), and Takashi Shimizu (“The Grudge”), all of whom made English-language versions of their own foreign-language features.
You can easily compare Lieneke with Barbara Bel Geddes' character in Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo"(1958); both are down-to-earth women who care about and are frustrated about the men obsessed on the mesmerizing ladies who disappeared from their sights.
The last shot of the film reminds me of that dour truth in Hitchcock's "Psycho"(1960).
It’s not often that a foreign director agrees to remake his or her own film in English and the results are no guarantee of quality - see (or rather, don’t) Dutch director George Sluizer’s abysmal remake of his own cult thriller The Vanishing.
With the assistance of Brenda (Warmerdam's wife, Annet Malherbe) and Ilonka (Eva van de Wijdeven), two other members of his weird tribe, Borgman rids the family of their gardener (Gene Bervoets, "The Vanishing") to enable an elaborate ruse with Ludwig and Pascal to get himself hired (also illustrating Richard's xenophobia and racism and Borgman's sway over the family's youngest, Isolde (Elve Lijbaart)).
Initially, it seems spliced together from two chilling classics, George Sluizer's "The Vanishing" (the original Belgian version from 1988, not the idiotic American remake) and, years before, Steven Spielberg's made-for-TV "Duel," about a psychopathic but entirely anonymous truck set on erasing a mild-mannered traveling salesman.
The situation at this point resembles the opening dilemma of "The Vanishing" (1988), a brilliant Dutch-French thriller (accept no substitutes; the 1993 U.S. remake is a pale shadow).
This could be a nice premise for an action thriller movie centered on the hero's search for hid loved one(Jonathan Mostow's "Breakdown"(1997) is a good example), but Sluizer's screenplay, based on his co-writer Tom Krabbѐ's novella "The Golden Egg", takes a more interesting route.
There's not even a view from immediately above (a vantage point that was perhaps the most chilling aspect of the Dutch buried-alive thriller The Vanishing, from 1988).
When George Sluizer remade his Dutch kidnapping thriller The Vanishing in Hollywood, the results were disastrous.
The cycle of films he oversaw from 1942 to 1946, most notably The Cat People (1942) and I Walked With a Zombie (1942), showed that simple shadows are more ominous than even the most skillful shock effect.
It won't be revealed here, but if you saw the 1988 film “The Vanishing,” it's something like that.
And it was, in fact, Shyamalan's love for “Call Me By Your Name” that compelled him to seek out the Thai cinematographer who, shooting “Trap” on 35mm Kodak film, brings both a cool-handed gloss and a grit as scuzzy and quietly ominous as something like 1988's Dutch thriller “The Vanishing” — also about an obsessive-compulsive serial murderer.
The Disappearance of Alice Creed (2009)
Directed by J Blakeson
influenced by The Vanishing (1988)
Visuals
Blakeson has a natural flair for scene-blocking, utilising the confined setting with great skill; his film can stand alongside similar thrillers such as Sidney Lumet’s Deathtrap (1982), George Sluizer’s Spoorloos (aka The Vanishing, 1988) and Daisuke Gotô delicately-titled Japanese shocker Girl in Captivity: Psycho Torture Chamber (2008).
With Funny Games, an update of his 1997 German film of the same name, Michael Haneke joins the shortlist of foreign directors who have remade their own movies for Hollywood, a group that includes George Sluizer (The Vanishing), Takashi Shimizu (The Grudge) and Ole Bornedal (Nightwatch).
Also, the cold, clinical portrayal of evil in this film reminded me of the work of Michael Haneke, especially “Funny Games” and “Cache”.