The Vanishing [1993]

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Editorial reviews

Amazon.co.uk Review
It's not unusual for Hollywood to remake European hits. What is unusual is the director of the original getting the chance to helm the new version with an American cast, which is what happened with this film based on an intensely creepy Dutch film of the same name (both directed by George Sluizer). Kiefer Sutherland and Sandra Bullock are on vacation when, while stopped at a crowded rest area, she disappears. He devotes the next several years to discovering what happened to her, ruining his life in the process. When he does get a clue, it leads him to Jeff Bridges, who plays a bizarre and highly organized individual whose motives are almost as strange as he is. Bridges is spooky, but Sluizer ultimately is undone by Hollywood's demand for a happy ending, which makes this film affecting but far less unsettling than the original. --Marshall Fine

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Amazon.co.uk Review
Forget Hitchcock, forget Brian De Palma, The Vanishing is one of the scariest, most disturbing thrillers ever made. Yet there's not a knife, a gun, or a drop of blood in sight. The terror in George Sluizer's film is wholly psychological, insidiously uncoiling itself before our incredulous eyes.

A young Dutch couple on holiday in France stop at a motorway service station, where the girl inexplicably vanishes. Desperately her boyfriend searches for her. Meanwhile, we're introduced to a dull, respectable French paterfamilias who, we gradually come to realise, is the man responsible for the girl's disappearance. But we don't know why, nor--yet more tantalisingly--what he's done with her. Neither does the boyfriend, for whom her disappearance becomes an obsession (the film's French title is L'Homme qui voulait savoir--"The Man Who Wanted to Know".) Finally, horribly, he finds out.

Operating quietly and cunningly, Sluizer keeps us constantly on edge. There's the unconventional plot structure, dropping us unexpectedly into what turns out to be an extended flashback; the twitchy disorientation of the hero, adrift in an alien language and culture (a shrewd use of the film's joint French/Dutch parentage); and above all the chillingly downbeat performance of Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu as the abductor, a living demonstration of the banality of evil.

The Vanishing is one of those rare movies that insinuates itself under the skin of the mind and cannot be dislodged. Ill-advisedly, Sluizer let himself be tempted to Hollywood to direct an English-language remake that jettisoned all the subtlety of the original and tacked on an inane happy ending. Shun that version; this is the one to go for.

On the DVD: The Vanishing comes to DVD with these slim pickings: the theatrical trailer, a filmography for Sluizer and a gallery of stills. But the transfer, digitally remastered in the original widescreen ratio, looks good and the sound matches it. --Philip Kemp

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Synopsis
Jeff Harriman is desperate to trace his girlfriend Diane Shaver, who disappeared whilst on holiday. Jeff's search soon becomes an obsession that leads to the ultimate nightmare...

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Customer reviews

review by: A Prince Among Maggots date: 2007-12-02 rating:
A shambolic desecration of an all-time classic.
Spoorloos, the Dutch/French original telling of this story, was incredibly successful and remains very popular to this day. Unfortunately this, the American remake directed by the same George Sluizer, frustratingly manages to produce what is almost a mirror-image in terms of value. A lot of this has been attributed to the tacked-on ending that pretty much negates what came before, but it is wrong to blame this alone. The film which precedes the climax is similarly disappointing.



**Most of you will now be aware of what happens, but I'll try my best not to give away too much of what Channel 4 viewers voted the 45th Best Scary Moment in broadcast history. The reason for this is that, although the original is more than worth watching regardless of how much you already know, I'm sure the enjoyment of it is aided further by the viewer's attempts at working out what its sinister antagonist could consider the ultimate act of evil. However, I might reveal aspects (or even big, meaty chunks) of the ending for THIS film, and this interpretation alone, as it's important to understand why it was, deservedly, so poorly received - especially by audiences outside of the United States.**

The first mistake, or the first questionable difference, is that the disappearence and its build-up are all shown in chronological order. In the first version, the story begins with the two victims (Rex and Saskia) driving towards a holiday home, only to have an argument that is then resolved at a petrol station. The supposed villain is then revealed, and then Rex realises his girlfriend has gone missing and is sent into panic. It then flashes back in time to Raymond (the man responsible) preparing for the deed and asking neighbours of his new farm estate about the level of noise they could hear when his beloved family were screaming. Several failed efforts are then shown before the story is brought forward to three years after Saskia went missing, where Rex is still searching for her.

In this remake, the preparation and previous efforts are shown BEFORE we meet the two future victims, this time called Jeff and Diane. This means we immediately know that Diane was kidnapped, unlike in the original where you could have formed the conclusion that she had just gone with the man of her own accord until it was proved otherwise. You're also left with a very unsympathetic baddie, renamed Barnie - presumably because you HAVE to feel some sentiment towards a man who shares a personal label with a dinosaur - whose numerous unsuccessful ventures into abduction are now on display long before his wife and children are introduced.

This may not have been such a problem had the characters eventually been played as vulnerable human-beings. They're not. As Barnie, Jeff Bridges simply comes across as a psycho with no real attempt at justification for what he's done. Not only that, but his strange, quasi-European accent (because pure Americans are incapable of such savage acts of anti-social felony) does nothing less than bludgeon our minds with the hammer of stereotype. Sandra Bullock's small amount of screen-time as Diane is spent whining and bickering with Jeff, leaving the viewer wondering why the two ever got together in the first place. And Kiefer Sutherland's Jeff is a self-motivated, cynical fop - a world away from the obsession-riddled loser portrayed so perfectly by Gene Bervoets five years prior. I don't blame the actors here in the slightest - in fact, all things considered, the two aforementioned male leads do as well as they could - but the material is so blatantly dire that not even Cooper and Brando would, if cast, raise this above two stars.

Oh yeah, that's another stupid decision on behalf of the filmmakers. One of the reasons Spoorloos is so effective is that everyone cast in the leading roles was a complete minnow. None of them, with the exception of Johanna ter Steege, had ever been seen before or has been seen since, which just adds to the depression felt once the tale has culminated. Had Sluizer taken that approach once more, perhaps we could feel some sort of emotional attachment to the characters being presented to us.

I'm not saying you always have to use unknowns - if that were the case, nobody would ever become established. However, the approach worked for the story first time around and would have worked best again, due to its dark nature. Instead, two 'hot property' actors and a woman who was in the midst of a rising career were chosen to represent isolation and unfamiliarity. On this occasion, the suspension of disbelief was far too great for them to achieve. Thankfully for them, the film was actually so bad, as the result of other peoples' stupidity, that none of the main actors' credibilities were really damaged.

So three years pass, although it seems longer on tape, and Jeff obtains a new girlfriend (Rita, played by Nancy Travis). We have to see them meet for the first time in this, because English-language spectators are apparently too slow to put two and two together and work out he's met someone else. We'd probably think it was his sister, wouldn't we? As Jeff's desire to find his past love doesn't really grow beyond 'light concern' or 'mild regard', I'm left scratching my head wondering how on Earth Sluizer thought this would enhance his stock. Is this really his 'vision'? No matter, because Rita gets annoyed anyway, and - unlike in the original, where she won't compete for his affections but still cares very deeply for him and wants him to be content in life, before leaving never to return - decides to get a very small amount of revenge by changing Jeff's answering machine message.

Of course, this is a new twist that allows for the horrendous finale to transpire down the line, as Jeff changes his message back but is interrupted while doing so by the appearance of Barnie. After beating the life out of him for the sake of it (Rex in Spoorloos hits and kicks Raymond due to shellshock and desperation, whereas Jeff just says "FTW" and pretty much smashes Barnie's head in for giggles), Jeff hops into Barnie's car and this degenerates into a buddy movie. Well, I wish it had because what we got instead was a very watered-down version of the revisiting/explanation sequences from Spoorloos. The scenes in which Barnie's motives are studied are apparently so worthless and unimportant to the plot that they have to contend with jolly background music and slow-motion camera techniques to hold the attention of the viewers, as well as being roughly a quarter of the length of the originals.

Once these, as well as the flashback of Diane's abduction taking place, are all over, the 'coffee scene' and the 'lighter scene' which marked the end last time around are copied almost word-for-word and shot-for-shot - although without ANY of the urgency, as Jeff's reaction when he realises what has happened to him (and, by proxy, Diane) is no more inspiring or heart-rendering than that of a man infuriated by an untimely power-cut. Albeit, obviously, not a power-cut that took place while watching this movie. I can imagine the fallout from THAT turn of events would probably involve balloons and whistling.

By rights, the film should finish here, and perhaps should have ended long beforehand just to put us out of our collective and individual miseries. I maybe would even have bumped the score up a bit if Rosanne Barr had apologised afterwards as a DVD extra. Alas, it was not to be, and the experience descends further into sub-hope as the most excrutiating of contrived plot-twists takes place.

You see, Rita is so proud of herself for violating Jeff's Smartbeep Autosave earlier in the day that she phones him, at a time she knows he'll be out, to let her friends take a listen. However, discovering the new recording - that, of course, involved Barnie and Jeff's acquaintance - she hurries off to find him. Somehow, she manages to track down Barnie's daughter at his suburban home, becomes friends with her in all of four minutes to the extent that she willingly tells her where the farmhouse is, and then travels there without any trouble finding it in the dark and in the middle of nowhere. She then works out almost immediately what has happened and, even more ridiculously, exactly WHERE it happened, and tricks Barnie into thinking she's kidnapped his daughter. So NOW we're supposed to readily accept that Barnie, a calculating and evil man with no conscience, is so compassionate and easy to fool that he would compromise his own safety and freedom on the grounds that Rita knew his daughter's name. JUST HER NAME and nothing more. I honestly could cry at that point.

Then, she promptly saves the day (and, of course, Barnie just HAS to get his comeuppance), and the film ends with - of all things - a 'feel-good' reversal of financial fortunes and A JOKE as its final line. And not even a good one. Yeah, keep telling yourself you're mentally crippled by your past, Jeff! The only thing it was missing was a pregnancy revelation and a letter from Diane saying she escaped and is living in Cuba. Although, admittedly, if Diane's parents had turned up to complain about Jeff's new business move and taken him to court for it, I might have heralded Todd Graff as the greatest genius on the west coast. Sadly, that didn't happen and what remains is an unmitigated apocalypse of quality.



A lot of idiots blast Martin Scorcese's The Departed because its characters are not faithful to the original, but what these people somehow fail to realise is that they're not supposed to be. It's a complete re-telling in a different climate with different incentives and motives, and it's just as good as - if not better than - Infernal Affairs. THIS is just an incredibly lazy remake of a much-heralded classic, an attempt to make some money from an audience they've determined as being too lazy to read subtitles and too fragile to accept anything bleak, which falls short in almost every conceivable way at creating anything that can be considered decent viewing.

In short, this is not just a disaster in relative terms, when compared to the original. It is, without a doubt, a horrific film in its own right.

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review by: rduk2000 date: 2007-09-04 rating:
The Kiefer Sutherland version is the terrible one
Amazon appear to have screwed up all the reviews which appear before this one, because some of them appraise the original Dutch version of the film, whereas the version on sale is the Hollywood remake.

I will try to make this as simple as I can:

The TERRIBLE version of The Vanishing is the Hollywood version (starring Kiefer Sutherland and Jeff Bridges).

The BRILLIANT version of The Vanishing is the original Dutch version (which I don't think is currently available on Amazon - try a well known online auction site instead).

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review by: date: 2007-04-04 rating:
Sorry guys, original is best!
For those wishing to share a debate that has obviously aroused strong feelings on both sides, there's a simple way to resolve this issue: watch both the original and the remake, then it will be quite apparent that the remake is not a good film. Quite apart from stretching credulity beyond all known limits to support Hollywood's desire for a clean ending with all loose ends tied and the hero coming out smelling of roses (almost literally here!), it lacks the freshness, vivacity and suspense crafted so beautifully in the first filming, the acting seems stale and the actors seem uncomfortable. I didn't believe in the remake, where the original made me jump out of my skin!

In short, nothing whatever to do with subtitles or being pretentious - one is a great film, the other is a poor imitation. Remakes are seldom if ever a good idea, and I say so more through sorrow, not anger.

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review by: date: 2005-11-15 rating:
How to destroy your career in one simple movie
George Sluizer's original Dutch-French version of The Vanishing (aka The Man Who Wanted to Know) offers one of European cinema's most quietly disturbingly anonymous and everyday sociopaths, feeling his way one step at a time towards murder. If you've seen that version, you probably still can't get the final revelation out of your head, but the film had plenty more to offer than that, playing with chronology, subverting the usual cliches of its 'Lady Vanishes' plot (the hero wants to know what happened to his missing lover far more than he wants her to be alive) and throwing in some excellent characterization. I can only assume that for this 1993 US remake Sluizer was so determined that no-one else was going to get the chance to ruin his film when he was perfectly capable of doing it himself, but few people could have anticipated how comprehensively he trashes his own work. His career never recovered.

Chief culprit is an astonishing performance by Jeff Bridges that has been overthought through in every detail to a truly disastrous level. A friend who produced one of his earliest movies noted that Bridges was a great instinctive actor as long as you stopped him thinking about what he was doing, and this film is the proof of the pudding. Every movement is overly mechanical in its precision, making him look like a rusty clockwork toy, while his voice is a bizarre mixture of Tootsie, Latka Gravas from Taxi and a Dalek who have all been taking elocution lessons from Dok-tah E-ville. No banality of evil here, just a looney walking around with an invisible sign over his head saying "Please. Let. Me. Kill. You. Thank you. For your. Consideration.'

But the blame really needs to be shared out here. None of the performances are good: often, they don't even look good - Keifer Sutherland looks more like a baby hamster than a distraught man at his wits end in the hurried scenes at the gas station, Nancy Travis flounders badly and Sandra Bullock makes no impression at all as the object of his obsession. Not that they're given any help by either director or writer Todd Graff. The script is particularly weak. The chronology has been altered to put the focus firmly on Bridges at the expense of the couple at the opening of the film. Worse is the rush the film is in, draining the life and character from each scene in its race to get to the next. Rather than the high/low mood shifts in the couple's relationship or the apparently casual but careful establishing of the feel of the location, we just get a couple of arguments that give you the impression that he's probably better off without her. As for the new and improved happy ending - standard woman chased by nutter in the woods jeopardy stuff complete with lame `let's end on a joke like a TV cop show' moment - best not go there... which is advice that holds for this entire trainwreck of a movie. Even a shockingly bland and uninspired Jerry Goldsmith score can't do anything for this one.

NB: Please note that due to a glitch on Amazon many of the reviews here are for the superior Dutch version - which definitely IS worth seeing.



review by: porkycat date: 2005-04-15 rating:
A high class thriller
Don't confuse this with the rather poor remake. It's hard to believe that the two were made by the same director. The remake has all the flaws you'd expect of a hollywood version of a quality european film and pretty much misses the point entirely.

The original is dark and pessimistic, the characters are believeable, portrayed with conviction, so it's easy to get involved. There's little violence, but the atmosphere does it all. The director and lead convey the passing of time and the increasing isolation, desperation and determination of the husband with considerable eloquence.

I first saw this film several years ago and it has lodged itself in my memory, so I think that once seen it's not easily forgotten. For all the right reasons!

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