The Vanishing (Argos Films, Co-Productiefonds Binnenlandse Omroep, Golden Egg Films, Ingrid Productions, MGS Film, Stichting Produktiefonds voor Nederlandse Films, Televisie Radio Omroep Stichting [TROS], 1988)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, May 7) I watched a rather grim film on Turner Classic Movies: The Vanishing (1988), a Dutch movie directed and co-written by George Sluizer based on The Golden Egg, a 1984 Dutch novel written by the film’s co-author, Tim Krabbé. The movie’s original Dutch title, Spoorloos, literally translates to “Without a Trace.” The film is partly in Dutch and partly in French (which briefly threw my husband Charles when he finally got home from work half an hour before it ended; I’d told him it was a Dutch movie but he clearly heard French on the soundtrack) and tells the story of a young couple, Rex Hofman (Gene Bervoets) and Saskia Wagter (Johanna ter Steege). Though they live in The Netherlands, they are driving through the south of France when their Renault car runs out of gas in the middle of a dark tunnel. Saskia, who’s regularly had dreams of being carried off into space inside a golden egg, freaks out when Rex walks out of the tunnel to go get help. She’s left behind in the car while he returns with a jerry-can full of gas which he puts in the car to refuel it. They drive to the nearest gas station, where Rex playfully gives Saskia the keys because he’s agreed to let her drive for a while. The gas station has a convenience store inside where Rex sends Saskia to buy them a beer and a Coke. Then Saskia totally disappears and it’s not until the end of the movie that we finally find out what happened to her. Meanwhile, we get a few scenes involving Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) – the name means “The Gloomy One.” We learn that as a boy he contemplated leaping off the balcony of his family’s second-floor apartment and, unlike most other boys who have that fantasy, he actually did it. Later on, as an adult chemistry teacher with a wife, Simone (Bernadette Le Saché), and two daughters, he rescues a teenage girl from drowning in a French canal and turns her over to her parents. Raymond keeps the doll the girl was holding in her hand when she nearly drowned as a keepsake, and his daughters acclaim him as a hero.

After Saskia’s disappearance, Rex goes on with his life but still can’t get her out of his mind, even when he finds a new partner, Lieneke (Gwen Eckhaus), who understandably tells him to forget about Saskia and concentrate on building his relationship with her instead. (Quite frankly, Lieneke is the sanest character in the film.) But Rex continues to put up “Missing” posters about Saskia until three years later, when his continued attention to the case (including the large amount of debt he’s running up borrowing money to continue his search for Saskia) attracts the attention of Raymond. Raymond casually and matter-of-factly accosts Rex and tells him he’s a sociopath and that, after he did the good work of rescuing the girl from drowning in the canal, he decided to test his moral worthiness (or lack of same) by doing something equally evil. He lures Rex into his car with the promise of showing him exactly what happened to Saskia, and after Rex first tries to beat him up and then uncertainly reconciles with him and drives off with Raymond at the wheel. They’re heading towards the same spot in the south of France where Raymond kidnapped Saskia in the first place. While they’re on the road we get a flashback scene showing us most of what happened to Saskia: for some time Raymond had been obsessed with the idea of kidnapping a woman in broad daylight and arranging it so no one would have any evidence of her existence. He worked out a plan by which he would pretend to be a motorist in need of help hitching a trailer to his car, a lure with which he would trap his female victim and get her to come running to him. Accordingly he zeroed in on Saskia, knocked her out with a chloroform-soaked rag, and then when she was unconscious …

Rex is torn between the desire to get away from Saskia and his curiosity about just what did happen to her, especially since Raymond insists that the only way he’ll ever find out is if he agrees to undergo the same fate as her. Raymond offers Rex a cup of coffee poured from a thermos which has been spiked with a drug that will render him unconscious 10 minutes after he takes it. Rex at first has the good sense to attempt to walk away from Raymond and his trap, but ultimately curiosity gets the better of him and he drinks the spiked coffee. When he comes to [spoiler alert!] he finds that he’s literally been buried alive. He lights a cigarette lighter (a present from Saskia lo those many years ago) and realizes he’s inside a wooden box with no way to get out or call for help. The film ends with Rex realizing that he’s going to die the same way Saskia did, and then cuts to Raymond at home with his wife and kids, free and with his family none the wiser about his dark, sinister hobby. The film’s last shot is of a newspaper announcing both Saskia’s and Rex’s disappearances three years apart from the same location, with their photos enclosed in egg-shaped ovals. It reminded me of all the 19th century stories in which a pair of star-crossed lovers are “reunited in death,” which used to strike me as romantic when I was a child but now I just find annoying. (This 19th-century Romantic obsession with death was why Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was more popular in the 19th century than it had been when Shakespeare wrote it.)

The Turner Classic Movies showing of The Vanishing was co-hosted by Eddie Muller of the Saturday evening “Noir Alley” and Alicia Malone, who regularly offers their programs of foreign films, and both went into panegyrics over how great it was. They even claimed that Stanley Kubrick had hailed it as the scariest film ever made, and when director Sluizer asked Kubrick about his own horror film The Shining (1979), Kubrick said The Shining was child’s play compared to The Vanishing. Far be it from me to argue with such praise, but I found The Vanishing to be awfully slow going; you had to wait through an hour and a half of plodding, dull exposition before you got to the good stuff in the last half-hour or so. Muller told a story about someone who’d gone to see The Vanishing in a theatre on its initial release, only the projection gear malfunctioned with just 10 minutes left to go in the film. The theatre management offered patrons a rain check to come back and see the movie another time, and Muller’s friend timed it so he’d arrive just 10 minutes or so before the ending. (Something similar happened to me in 1987 when I went to see the film Fatal Attraction with a man I was dating during a brief estrangement from my then-partner, only we took the option we were given of seeing another movie in the same theatre complex, which turned out to be the 1987 Black Widow. So it wasn’t until years later that I finally watched the nihilistic ending of Fatal Attraction on a home-recorded videotape with Charles during the early years of our relationship.) It did occur to me that last night Charles got to see all of The Vanishing he really needed to watch: he walked in at the start of the flashback that showed Raymond’s abduction and overpowering of Saskia and got to see the final scene.

There are some nice touches along the way, including the detail that when Rex and Saskia are seen together in the framing sequences, she smokes but he doesn’t; three years later, under the stress of Saskia’s disappearance, he’s taken up the habit. (I think the makeup department really overdid the artificial aging of Gene Boeverts to play the later Rex; he looks 10 years older, not just three.) There’s also the “planting,” almost literally, of two metal objects (we were told they were rings, though they looked like coins to me) under a tree by Rex and Saskia during their short-lived idyll; and Rex digging them up when Raymond leads him back to the spot three years later. And there’s a neat uncertainty about the nature of Rex’s and Saskia’s relationship; in one scene they describe themselves as a married couple, but mostly they’re not and I presumed they used the “M”-word just to avoid shocking the townspeople in the south of France. The film also reminded me of Richard Fleischer’s The Boston Strangler (1968) in that both Albert DeSalvo, the alleged “Boston Strangler,” and Raymond Lemorne are depressingly ordinary family men with wives, children (two each), and good jobs (Raymond is a chemistry teacher in a part of the world where teachers are more respected and better paid than here) who are quite normal when they aren’t actually out killing other people. And there's the grim fact that Raymond gets away with both murders, something that would have been strictly forbidden in classic Hollywood under the old Production Code. Also there’s a scary scene at the very end of the film in which a woman gardener comes to the site of Rex’s premature burial with a watering can, and just when we’re thinking, “O.K., she’s going to discover a freshly dug grave where there shouldn’t be one and either she’s going to dig him out herself or alert the authorities,” she just walks on by and there’s a chilling shot of Raymond’s car, which makes it look like he’s deliberately parked on top of Rex’s grave a) so he can’t get out even if he can dig his way out (the way a similarly interred protagonist – a woman instead of a man – did in the 2024 Lifetime movie Buried Alive and Survived: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/11/buried-alive-and-survived-swirl-films.html), and b) so no one will notice that there’s a grave where one shouldn’t be.

In 1993 George Sluizer was hired by producers at 20th Century-Fox to remake The Vanishing as an American film, but he was required to up the gore quotient and give it a happy ending. Todd Graff, who wrote the American version and also co-produced it, changed the character names from Rex to “Jeff Harriman” (Kiefer Sutherland), Saskia to “Diane Shaver” (Sandra Bullock), the villain Raymond to “Barney Cousins” (Jeff Bridges, top-billed as Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu was in the original), and the replacement girlfriend Lieneke to “Rita Baker” (Nancy Travis). According to the Wikipedia synopsis, after “Jeff” wakes up buried alive in a coffin, “Rita calls home and listens to the changed outgoing message on the answering machine, which had incidentally recorded Barney's voice when he first confronted Jeff. Realizing that Jeff is in danger, she talks with the next door neighbor who witnessed the attack. She learns of Barney’s identity and goes to his home and meets his daughter Denise. Not knowing the circumstances and on her way to meet a boy, Denise rides with Rita and gives her directions to her father's cabin. When Rita arrives, a violent fight ensues with Barney eventually gaining the upper hand. Barney offers Rita the same deal that he offers Jeff, but Rita outsmarts him. She lies to Barney and tells him that she has kidnapped Denise. She gets Barney to drink drugged coffee, but does not realize the drug takes 15 minutes to take effect. She goes in search of Jeff and finds a fresh mound of dirt. Believing that he has been buried alive, she digs him out, but is thwarted at the last minute by Barney. Jeff climbs out of the grave, kills Barney with the shovel, and embraces Rita. He sees another grave and finally accepts Diane’s death. Jeff and Rita reunite as a couple and sell the story as a novel to a publishing company.”

I had initially assumed Turner Classic Movies was showing the 1988 The Vanishing as half of a double bill of European thrillers that were remade in the U.S. – just before The Vanishing they had shown the 1961 French film Purple Noon, the first adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley – though last night’s TCM remit was broader than that and less well defined. But the difference between the Dutch/French 1988 The Vanishing and the American(ized) remake from five years later is that between a flawed but nonetheless honest movie and a hoked-up U.S. version that, if the Wikipedia synopsis is to be believed, stripped all the grim honesty out of the story and substituted the kind of clichéd resolution Lifetime’s writers would have given this tale.