The Vanishing (1988)
Directed by George Sluizer
Rex and Saskia, a young couple in love, are on vacation when they stop at a busy service station. Saskia is abducted in broad daylight and three years pass with no answers or closure surrounding her disappearance. Rex has nearly given up all hope when he suddenly begins receiving letters from her abductor.
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6 films that influenced The Vanishing
What critics say influenced The Vanishing
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.)
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.
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).
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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.
Probably, like Hitchcock, who made two versions of "The Man Who Knew Too Much", Sluizer thought he could try another direction in his story, but "The Vanishing" is a claustrophobic thriller which logically narrows down step by step to the only ending possible for its story, and that ending is absolutely required for the gut-wrenching effect in the finale.