Spoorloos [The Vanishing] (1988)

(On Cable TV, November 2020) I really, truly dislike movies that give me the impression of having wasted my time, and there are few surer paths to that feeling than a nihilistic script that seems to delight into the worst of what humanity has to offer. The Vanishing is an ugly, pointless, disturbing film. It’s a procedural psychopathic killing film, one that uses an unusual structure to overexplain the details of a heinous murder, and doesn’t spare the protagonist trying to understand how his girlfriend could vanish in plain daylight. The premise has a couple of tourists stopping at a French rest stop and the woman being kidnapped. When the film picks up three years later, her boyfriend has been nearly driven mad by the lack of answers—and then the killer toys with him. Thanks to flashbacks, we spend a lot of time with the psychopathic antagonist, seeing his exemplary family life and deliberate preparations for the act. Much of the film’s third act is a lengthy discussion between the protagonist and antagonist, but you won’t like where it’s headed, with curiosity killing the cat in a particularly brutal fashion. This is a film that aims to make you feel unsettled and it succeeds—perhaps too well, because by the end of it I was actively disliking the film and vowing never ever to see it again or recommend that others do so. Every so often, there are movies that remind me that it’s fine not to be an overly jaded cynic—that’s it’s perfectly fine to hate a film for its bleakness, for having no further idea on its mind that “evil exists.” I will take any bland happy ending over where The Vanishing ends up.