There are two versions of this film which both directed by the same person; George Sluizer. The first is subtitled and is a Dutch/French production that I watched last night. The second is a US remake starring Kiefer Sutherland, Jeff Bridges, Nancy Travis and Sandra Bullock. The first is raved about as a near perfect film, the remake is scorned as a disastrously americanised celluloid travesty.

Remember how I mentioned in my review of Session 9 that I don’t scare easily? Well, this film scared me.

“Scared” probably isn’t the right word; I was certainly stunned, definitely perturbed and more than a little un-nerved. For those reasons alone I must recommend this film. The ending, which I was vaguely aware as being one of those endings which people talk about (or would do if they’d seen this film), but I’d either managed to totally avoid any spoilers or totally forget the details. A bloody good thing too as I’m sure it would have lessened the impact.

It did make an impact too. My heart rate has just gone up just thinking about it.

Ok, good, bad and ugly time. Not necessarily in that order and without any ugly because there wasn’t really any apart from the dated late 80’s stylings of it.

This film is, unsurpisingly, very european which perhaps goes some way to explaining why the remake was so poor. (The main reason being that the remake changed the ending - you know, the one that I said was great? Yeah, well, they changed it.) It starts quite slowly and takes a while to really kick off. When it does, they change the focus of the story completely
- by which I don’t mean it changes tone or genre or whatever, simply that they stop following the character we started with and follow another. It’s not that this is never done in Hollywoodland but there, the general rule is never be away from your protagonist for more than 2 pages or 2 scenes or something. In The Vanishing, we spend something like 20 minutes with a different character.

It’s important though because we need to fully understand what happens. We get to know the people involved, we get to know about their lives and we get to understand them better. I was going to say that we get to sympathise with them but I don’t think that’s necessarily true - but we do get to see them as human and I feel that subsequently, the emotional impact of the film is deepened.

Essentially this film is a mystery thriller. There’s no gore, no shocks, nothing supernatural and no monsters. The story is simple: a dutch couple go on holiday in France. At a service station, the woman goes to get some drinks for the journey and doesn’t come back. So her boyfriend starts looking for her. That’s all I’m going to leave you with because saying any more will just spoil it for you.

This film is a masterful study of obssession and wickedness. It is, at times, darkly humorous and ultimately is very disturbing. If you can get your hands on it for Hallowe’en, then you would do worse than scare yourself silly with this absolute gem.