The Vanishing (1988) Directed by George Sluizer
I watched
The Vanishing again reluctantly. I thought about faking it, writing a review based on my memory of the film. That didn't seem much in the spirit of the thing, though. Don't get me wrong, I think
The Vanishing is an excellent film, one that takes a spot in the nether regions of my top hundred films. But I didn't want to watch it again. The experience is discomforting and just weirds me out. It's not like there is a single scene that bothers me; it's not the movie's violence that gets me, because there is virtually none in the movie except for the two acts of murder; and its not even the plot line which I am sure would be less memorable in another director's hands. I think what Sluizer does here is to create a masterpiece of plausibility. I'm not talking documentary realism here or neo-realism. I'm talking about the ability to create a work that convinces me that it could be real in this sense--that a sociopathic killer might function exactly this way. In other words, every scene in the movie quietly convinces me of the film's verisimilitude. Raymond is a perfect creation of horror largely because he seems so convincingly credible. When he takes it upon himself to balance an act of good with an act of evil, he takes on the inevitability of a force of nature. Yet his commitment is almost mundane--this is not a man of exceptional passion or vision or egocentricity, this is an intelligent, remorseless guy on a mission, basically giving his all to the equivalent of what from his point of view is little more than a lab experiment. With his happy family life and comfortable existence, he seems like he could be anybody.
Director George Sluizer in a relatively few strokes creates such an appealing victim, young, lovely, full of life, that the crime has even greater force. Saskia is a great stand in for all our daughters and wives and partners and girlfriends. Partly what is effective here is not just the winsome performance by Johanna ter Steege, though she makes a great contribution to the movie. What makes this character work more than anything else is that there is only one of her, convincingly and sympathetically drawn, so her single death has great impact. If she was just one of seven or eight victims, i.e., the tired genre formula, neither she nor the movie would have anything approaching the same impact. By identifying with one victim, it is much easier to experience the genuine horror of the situation. Part of what gives the movie power is part of what gave the best Hitchcock movies power: the character development afforded both hunter and hunted deepens the audience's commitment to what is going on. The only real difference is that Hitchcock kept reminding you that you were in a movie with all his marvelously entertaining set pieces--Sluizer as a director doesn't have that kind of personality and, as a result, his hand seems far less visible than Hitchcock's--meaning there is one less buffer between the the audience and the events that we see on the screen.
In fact, I'm not sure a great director would have been able to make this movie anywhere near as well as Sluizer does. Sluizer seems to be an odd case. He makes one superb movie, is hired for the terrible Hollywood remake in which he consents to piss all over his own canvas, suggesting that he never had a vision to compromise in the first place. And then nothing--he makes a few meaningless movies and drops from sight. Perhaps, though, it is the absence of a discernible personality in the director's chair, that helps to make the original
The Vanishing so effective. While the editing is exceptional in this movie, much of the film's portrayal of Raymond's existence and family life seems like it could come from any one of a hundred European movies. As a result, the very ordinary nature of some scenes contributes to the horror's matter-of-fact plausibility. Resisting the opportunity to jazz it up or impose his personality, Sluizer creates something that is very hard to come by at the movies: genuine dread.
So the end result is the horrific death of two people whom I don't want to see die, but, more importantly, a story that relentlessly shows that there are creatures out there that we can't even see fully capable of such monstrous acts and utterly devoid of remorse. Not a truth that I wish to be reminded about too often.
Later: the thought occurs to me belatedly that maybe my disquiet all boils down to the fact that
The Vanishing ends up being such a perfect example of existential randomness. Maybe that is the scariest thing about it.
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