The Vanishing

Two young lovers travel by car through a foreign country. They quarrel, then make up, pledging their love by burying a pair of coins beneath a tree. Then, at a petrol station through which thousands pass daily, the woman vanishes. Hours pass, days pass, years pass. Even after finding a new partner, the man still searches for his vanished love, until the day comes when he is offered a proposal—one that will grant him the knowledge he’s long sought, and will, in a sense, grant the lovers a belated reunion.

Reduced to such a synopsis, The Vanishing assumes the character of a fable or myth, but if you’ve seen the film in its original 1988 European co-pro iteration—its director, George Sluizer, later helmed an American remake that pales in comparison—you know that no amount of context can diffuse its profoundly harrowing, incremental intensity. What’s more, the above outline describes only half the story: for every scene depicted from the lovers’ point of view, there is a matching scene that follows the preparations, execution, and aftermath of the vanishing as experienced by the person responsible for it. Sluizer’s ingenious approach provides equal opportunity to identify with both protagonist and antagonist.

The film was based on a novel by Tim Krabbé, though he and Sluizer fell out over the details of its adaptation. There’s a sinister symmetry to this, given that the young couple hail from Krabbé’s homeland, the Netherlands, while the antagonist is, like Sluizer, French-born. Indeed, The Vanishing is rife with such binaries: the couple’s interactions are heavily gendered—a key scene finds the man ignoring the fuel gauge’s warnings, and then, when the car predictably runs out of gas, he tells the woman she’s being hysterical—while protagonist and antagonist, both men, are aligned in their twin obsessions. 

The Vanishing is so consistently soul-chilling: why keep returning to it? Mirroring the perfect crime at its core, the film is immaculately crafted, blending bold structural innovation with classical, Hitchcock-worthy storytelling. There are so many elegant touches, such as the Tour de France commentary cheerfully emanating from every radio while tensions surge in the first half, or the way Sluizer films the antagonist’s rehearsals from a God’s-eye view, as though looking down into a grave. There’s also Henny Vrienten’s moody jazz score, which includes strings, keys, and electric guitar, but is distinguished by the slippery sound of its fretless bass.

But I think the aspects of the film that are most haunting, that lure me back every few years, are precisely those that topple its genre designation from neo-noir into horror. It’s in the purity of the antagonist’s malevolence, and the “eternal uncertainty” of which he speaks. It’s in the woman’s dream of being trapped inside a golden egg, recalled while passing through a long, dark tunnel—followed by her request that the man promise never to abandon her, both freighted with the burden of prophecy. It’s in the realization that, despite the predominant air of realism, The Vanishing is ultimately a Gothic love story, reaching its natural conclusion with the perverse fulfillment of a lover’s contract. 🩸