When his girlfriend Saskia (Johanna ter Steege) disappears, Rex (Gene Bervoets) is tormented by the mystery and spends years trying to find out what happened to her.
One day, a stranger, Raymond (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), approaches him and confesses that he was responsible for Saskia’s disappearance.
He makes Rex an offer he cannot refuse…
The Vanishing is not a movie about seeking resolution, but about the understandable, human need to understand the incomprehensible.
There is almost no mystery to the film - the film separates the viewer from Hofman’s need for closure.
While the film follows him on the fateful day, it deviates from Hofman’s ‘seeker’ narrative early on, to focus on Saskia’s killer - to reveal the mystery that will drive Hofmannto his own demise.
We follow Lodeman, at various points, pre- and post-Saskia.
Filmed from a distance, his scheming comes across as both pre-meditated and farcical. Rather than a villainous mastermind, he is revealed to be as much a victim to chance as Hofman. He is just lucky that his scheme comes off.
Hofman’s crusade is reframed - his obsession is rendered more tragic. His desire to know is rendered fruitless - even before he wakes up in a box.
The film wrestled with the idea of predestination versus human nature.
Are these characters destined to collide? Or are their personalities hardwired to put them on this course?
The film establishes the two main characters as implacable in following through on their own goals.
In his introductory sequence, Rex and Saskia have an argument: He blows up when they run out of gas and abandons her in a darkened tunnel. Despite her pleas, Hofmannis fixated on proving his own self-reliance and control.
Even though Saskia sticks by him, there is an undercurrent of tension. Is he in love with her, or the fact that she sticks by him?
Hofman’s obsession with Saskia is ultimately about control - he cannot exist without this question answered.
In another doubling, he loses his next relationship over solving the mystery - and is completely at the mercy of Lodeman when the killer baits him with a potential resolution.
The one element of the film which struck the wrong note of discord - the score is alternately effective (the slide guitar amplifying Hofman’s loneliness), and discordant (stabs of synths that feel like a parody of thriller scare motifs).
It would be easy to dismiss this score as a time capsule of musical aesthetics which fails to function. However it feels more intentional, disorienting the audience’s expectations in the same that the shift in narrative focus to Lodeman does.
As I was leaving my screening, someone brought up the American remake. I have not seen it, but I know it changes the ending.
The Vanishing is the antithesis of a conventional genre story - it is a film about frustrating convention and viewer expectation. It is a movie about why we tell ourselves stories, and how storytelling is a way of organising and explaining our fears.
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