T-pini•n:The Vanishing — The Evil That (Normal) Men Do
Written: Jul 08 '00 (Updated Feb 09 '01)
Product Rating:
Pros: If you're looking for frills-free deep thrills, you found it!
Cons: If you're looking for frills-added cheap thrills, forget it!
The Bottom Line: The Vanishing is a psychological thriller that questions how far someone will go in search of the truth and introduces a unique version of evil. Truly a must see!
... that is what I had to say after getting through this movie.
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OK hotshot, what would you do?
During a road trip to a foreign country, your friend goes to get drinks from a gas station. That is the last you see of Her.
You spend the next few years going through girlfriends, because you can never forget Her. She becomes an obsession. You start a campaign to try to learn what happened to Her. You go on foreign TV to plead for information, any information about what happened to Her.
Three years after her disappearance, a man shows up outside your apartment. He claims he knows what happened to Her. He is going to return to his car in five minutes and drive back to his country. You can forget him. Or you can go with him and learn what happened to Her, as long as you do everything that he tells you to do. This is the only chance you’ll ever get to learn what happened to Her.
What would you do, hotshot?
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flash*now
Rex Hofman and Saskia Wachter are a playful Dutch couple traveling to France. They have their disagreements on the way, but you can see that they’re very much in love.
At a stop to get gas and stretch their legs, they bury two coins beside a tree as a symbol of Rex’s promise to never leave her. Then she goes in to get some drinks and...
... vani
She was last seen talking to a man by the coffee machine. The police are unable to help.
*flashback
Next follows a 15 minute sequence which introduces the French Raymond Lemorne, a claustrophobic chemistry teacher, and his family. Raymond is ostensibly working on renovating a house, but you will slowly come to realize by the end of the sequence that he’s using the privacy of the house to... whoa!
flashforward*
Three years later. Raymond comes across another poster asking for information on Saskia, and, as he’s done a number of times before, sends a postcard to Rex requesting a meeting not too far from the gas station where Saskia vanished.
And as before, Rex arrives, this time with Lieneke, who has been with him the longest – 8 months. And as before, no one ends up meeting him. That leads Lieneke to urge him to forget Saskia and make something of his life. And Rex is perhaps ready to stop...
... but he has a dream, where he and Saskia, trapped within a pair of golden eggs, meet. This is almost identical to the dream Saskia had the night before she disappeared. With renewed hope, he appears on French TV once more with an appeal. He doesn’t want to hurt the person who took Saskia. He means the abductor no harm. All he wants is the truth. What happened to Her?
And thus it is that Raymond gathers up courage to travel to the Netherlands to meet Rex with his offer. Come with me now, and you’ll know. Don’t come, and you’ll wonder...
... forever...
After an initial outburst of violence, Rex makes his decision.
He goes.
Obsession | Compulsion
Rex is a creature of obsession. The hunt for information on Saskia devours him. He’s borrowed a lot of money for the campaign, received bogus letters from people in different countries who have seen Saskia, appeared on French TV a number of times, lost girlfriends, including the latest, Lieneke, in the string of failures to form a bond past Saskia. For a revealing look at the enormity of his obsession, look for the computer program he’s created.
Rex, originally a non-smoker, began smoking the night Saskia disappeared.
Raymond is a creature of compulsion. His wife and daughter suspect that he’s using the house renovation project (the house lies about half an hour away from their apartment) to see a mistress. Watch him explain to his wife that the project is a passion, a plan that appeals to the mind, something where one realizes that he’s way over his head, and yet persists with it just for the sake of persistence. The double entendres are obvious, for you have already seen that he uses the house to practice his plan to... well, practice his plan.
Raymond will carry on with the plan just to see if he can do it...
... it being the most horrifying thing he can imagine happening to a human.
Stark, efficient acting
The four main actors put in an efficient, competent performance. There is no exaggeration, no wasted moves, almost nothing extra.
Gene Bervoets plays Rex with a manic intensity. He exudes a hint, a threat of violent desperation that is never too far from the surface. In his frenzy to get something done right after Saskia vanishes, Rex prompts the store manager to separate the coins from the coffee machine for the police, for the kidnapper’s fingerprints are surely on some of those coins. As the manager quietly remarks, ‘Mr. Hofman, that’s absurd!’
Watch the fixed intensity with which he stares at a video of his latest appearance on TV appealing to the abductor. Watch his eyes as they flick-flick from side-side as he runs his computer program after Lieneke leaves.
Long-suffering Lieneke is portrayed by Gwen Ekhaus. She has been with Rex for quite a long time, has put up with quite a lot. She is gentle, she is caring. Despite the calmness she emanates in her long probing stares, the strain of sharing Rex with someone who isn’t there is beginning to tell. She will not do something without thinking long about it. And thus when she decides to leave, all Rex can say is ‘I’m sorry,’ for he cannot get Her out of his mind.
The vanishing Saskia is impersonated with verve by Johanna Ter Steeg. A bit clumsy, vivacious Saskia is friendly, but takes offense if pushed too hard. Watch the distance Saskia puts between herself and Rex in the car after their disagreement at the beginning – she is scrunched up against the passenger side door.
Yet she is just as quick to forgive and go back to being friendly again. And it’s her inherent amiability that gets her into a conversation in broken French with Raymond.
Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu is the calculating Raymond. Raymond, an admitted sociopath, tries to test everything, plan every minute detail before he takes action. He seems normal on the outside, with a wife and two daughters. Yet, he knows he’s not normal, but as he responds when accused of madness by Rex, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ So what brings out the monster from the mundane?
Compelling Themes
The philosophical undercurrents in the movie are just as stark as the action. We are talking about predestination and cheating fate. We are wondering how far someone will go to fulfill his obsession, his compulsion.
This is a T-pinion authored by tipu. If you’re reading this under any other name, this review has been plagiarized. Please report the user to abuse@epinions-inc.com. Sorry to have to put this in.
During their trip back to France – Raymond discusses a childhood experience where he jumped from a first floor balcony to the paved street below... just to show that he isn’t a creature of predestination – ‘because it was preordained that I should not jump, I jumped.’
He talks of a recent trip where he saved a drowning child, which earned him his daughter’s considerable admiration. But, in his off-color thinking, Raymond felt that this hero worship is undeserved, unless he can prove himself incapable of committing some truly horrible crime, for ‘there is no white without black.’ And thus the plan to abduct someone, and do to them the most horrible thing possible...
... and in having succeeded in doing so, he has actually lost the game. Despite his plans going awry, it seems like he is predestined to run into Saskia. Caught up in his plan, this time he is unable to escape that predestination. In fact, though Rex loses in one sense, in another sense he wins by turning the tables on Raymond by cheating predestination.
The viewer also has to cope with the fact that someone like Raymond could simply plan and carry this out. This man is in no way related to Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot. What could drive someone so seemingly... common... to commit such an evil deed following a heroic one?
The Technical Stuff
The camerawork here is simple, stark (I can’t seem to stop using that word!) There are no real camera tricks. The camera stays still and the actors do all the work – fidgeting, eyes moving from side to side, grimacing. The camera is impersonal, not following anyone, allowing people to move in and out of its field of vision. Only at the beginning and ending of the film does the camera move around aimlessly for a while (remember how Forrest Gump began and ended?), me...a...n...de...r...in...g for a while before coming to rest on something.
Some shots are taken from high up. Hollywood directors might have
s
...w
..........o
................o
........................ped steadily down to the scene once the action got going, but here, the camera stays put. We get a bird’s eye view of what is going on.
You may have seen the camera
flit-.............flit-
...........flit-............flit-
flitting around to give a sense of panic or disorientation in some movies. But in the moments right after Saskia’s abduction, the camera remains still, Raymond’s sweaty face just filling the screen. He fidgets and glances around (reminiscent of Jean Reno in, say, The Professional), parts of his face rapidly disappearing and reappearing on and off the screen. This effectively told of the heightened pulse that comes with the momentary panic of normal people doing something daring.
The music is... yes, you guessed it, didn’t you?! The simple, somber notes at times is reminiscent of the Twin Peaks theme. It works well – there are long stretches of silence from the soundtrack, and then at crucial moments, a gentle crashing crescendo of chords elevates the emotion.
Tying Together the Odds ‘n Ends
The Vanishing is based upon the novel ‘The Golden Egg’ by Tim Krabbé. The 1988 movie (Dutch title Spoorloos, French title L'Homme Qui Voulait Savoir), directed by George Sluizer, is in Dutch-French with subtitles. I had no problems at all following along with the subtitles. In 1993, Sluizer made a Hollywood version of the film starring Jeff Bridges & (goddess) Sandra Bullock. General consensus is that it didn’t fare as well as its foreign counterpart.
The abduction is carefully choreographed by Raymond, but things always seem to go wrong. ‘Even the best laid plans can be destroyed in a second,’ we find, as the flashbacks reveal the bittersweet hilarious circumstances that led to Saskia’s capture.
Remember the two coins that were buried way at the beginning of the movie? They play their part near the end. Which takes us to the next point.
Morbid curiosity keeps the viewers watching, as loose threads from the earlier portions are slowly spliced scene after scene. I’d compare this aspect of the movie to Douglas Adams’ tale — Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency in that at the beginning, lots of things just happen and we’re not sure why, but as we keep watching, by the end, everything is neatly tied together. If you must go get more popcorn or a few more jugs of moonshine, do use the Pause button, or you will miss vital parts of the puzzle...
... even if you’re away for a minute.
O horror of horrors! I haven’t yet talked about the ending. And I don’t think I will say too much about it. On a second viewing, I can see very few subtle hints. But overall, it is unexpected. And it is the only part of the movie that prevents this from being a family film. Do not watch this with kids. Not the ending. Let me repeat that a bit more forcefully:
Do not watch this with kids. Not the ending.
If you do, they will have nightmares. And daymares.
Actually, in reading the other epinions available, codefire (04/07/00) believes that most teenagers would fall asleep watching the movie anyway. I’m not sure I completely agree. While a good many may be turned off by the lack of the normal Hollywood staples – sex, violence, fast vehicles, superweapons, excessive cursing, and sex, I feel that there are teenagers who would actually be pleased to find a movie that is a kind of continuously unfolding visual puzzle.
By getting readers involved right from the beginning, psychovant (12/30/00) makes the point that something like the situation in the film could happen to anyone. Years after seeing the film for the first time, eplovejoy (12/14/00) still gets the shivers on re-seeing it. He didn't think much of the U.S. remake, though justcathy (09/09/00) enjoyed both versions.
Another reviewer, msanto (12/17/99), claims that he can usually tell the ending coming, but couldn’t see this one. He also thinks that when you find out what happened, you, like Rex, will laugh hysterically and exclaim ‘Oh, excrement!’ Well, that will possibly be the case. As Rex mutters at the end, ‘My name is Rex Hofman, and this is a bit weird!’ Which is an understatement.
I’ve never read the book, but from what I’ve heard of it, I imagine that this movie might be comparable to the atmosphere of Camus’s The Stranger.
Watch this movie! Watch this movie and then ask yourself how often a movie released in the late 80’s without any sex, things blowing up, aliens or big guns, swearing and so little violence has made you think so much.
Watch this, and perhaps, at the end, you’ll find yourself saying...
I don’t think I’ll be trying too many movie reviews. For one thing, I don’t get to watch all that many movies. But now and then, I’ll see something that seems enough off the beaten track to write about. Please let me know how I’m doing.
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Don’t comment now! Watch the movie and then come back!
06/18 – 06/21/00, 06/23, 07/07-07/08
09/09
Added French title reference
02/09/01
Added mention to epinions of eplovejoy, justcathy, & psychovant
Added Bottom Line
A young man begins an obsessive search for his girlfriend aftershe mysteriously disappears during their sunny vacationgetaway. His three-year investig...More at Buy.com
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