“You start with an idea in your head, and you take a step… then a second… Soon, you realize you’re up to your neck in something intense, but that doesn’t matter. You keep at it for the sheer pleasure of it. For the pure satisfaction it might bring you.”
So goes a line from The Vanishing. After watching the 1988 Dutch thriller, Stanley Kubrick picked up the phone to call its director, George Sluizer. Sluizer said Kubrick told him he’d already seen it 10 times and considered it the scariest film he’d ever watched.
Released in Dutch as Spoorloos, meaning Without a Trace, the film follows Rex (Gene Bervoets) and Saskia (Johanna ter Steege), a couple traveling through France for a biking holiday. Saskia goes into a gas station to buy drinks.
Rex waits outside. She never returns.
3 years later, he’s still searching. The film also introduces Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), a chemistry professor with a family who carefully rehearses how to abduct a woman. The story gives viewers access to the man behind the disappearance while Rex remains desperate for answers.
The novella that inspired the film grew from a newspaper story author Krabbé read about a woman who disappeared during a bus stop after going to buy gum. In that case, she’d boarded the wrong bus and reunited with her family the next day.
The film also draws on “The Vanishing Hotel Room,” an urban legend about a daughter returning to a Paris hotel to find her mother missing and the staff claiming they never saw her.
