"The Vanishing": I don't get it. (COMPLETE SPOILERS)

Cafe Society
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**Be forewarned the entire movie is spoiled here. ** Otherwise I’d have to include the entire message in a spoiler box, which seems silly.

Okay, I’m talking about the original, 1988 version. I rented it and watched it after seeing it mentioned several times on this board as “chilling” and “haunting” and so forth. I was careful to avoid any description of what happens other than the basic minimum (wife goes missing at a gas stop, husband spends three years searching for her).

So: what am I missing? As the credits rolled, I wasn’t thinking of words like “chilling” or “haunting” or “disturbing” so much as “dumb” and “predictable.” I mean, it wasn’t a bad movie, it just had absolutely no impact on me whatsoever. I can’t see how the ending was remotely scary for anyone who’s ever read a thriller novel or seen a suspense movie. The movie says what it’s going to do at the beginning, and then it just proceeds to do it over the next two hours.

The only point at which I was wondering what was going to happen was when goatee guy was describing how he ran into Saskia in the gas station; I expected that he was going to reveal that he’d intended to abduct her, but was distracted and something far far worse happened. But of course that whole line of thinking was dropped within a few minutes, as if the movie was quickly trying to get back on track so that there be absolutely no suspense involved whatsoever. The guy said he was a sociopath not long after meeting the husband, plus we’d seen him stalking women and planning his abduction for over an hour at this point. I just didn’t see where the tension was coming from.

Remember I warned you that there were SPOILERS

Now, I understand that being buried alive would be truly horrible were it to happen in real life. But this is fiction, and it’s been happening to people in fiction for hundreds of years. Plus, it was the first thing I thought of when Saskia talks about being trapped in a golden egg, and then confirmed when goatee guy buys the secluded house in the middle of nowhere.

I even said, “Okay, it’s a European movie, it’s not about plot, so everything’s symbolic.” And yeah, I get that too – it’s a metaphor for death. No one knows what happens after death. Everyone is going to die. We all die alone. There are lots of cliches about death, and they’re cliches because they’re thoughts that everyone has had at one point or another. So is it a character study about obsession and/or dissociative behavior? Maybe, but I thought that character studies had to be more subtle than having characters walking around explicitly saying, “I’m obsessed” or “I exhibit dissociative behavior.”

So again: what’d I miss?

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I have no clue what you missed, since this movie was so incredibly disturbing to me that it’s one of the few movies that I won’t see again. It took me a week to get over it! That whole thing… being buried alive… <brrrrr>

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I saw the movie when I was eighteen, and the ending was a complete and total shock for me. If you guessed the ending beforehand, I could see how that would lessen the impact.

For me, it worked like this:

  • Something terrible and mysterious happens.
  • We get closer to finding out what the terrible, mysterious thing is.
  • The protagonist takes a huge risk in order to find out what the mystery solution is.
  • The risk doesn’t really pay off.

But yeah, if you know what the mystery’s solution is beforehand, then a lot of the tension in the movie will be gone.

Daniel

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I think the surprise, the chilling part, is that the movies doesn’t cop out at the end.

How many movies don’t allow the protagonist to discover what was done to his girlfriend and then kill or at least bring to justice her assailant? You only have to see the American remake to understand how those sorts of endings are almost NEVER allowed to happen in movies.

It is pretty shocking (at least to me) that the bad guy wins. Walking out of that movie, you have to have your faith in the basic goodness of the universe shaken at least a little bit.

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I think that is the key. The antagonist is an outwardly normal person who simply decides one day to do something horrifically evil. And his motivation for these crimes? To discover something about himself. He is a psychopath, walking among the populace, with no guilt or remorse for what he has done to two completely innocent people.

This movie probably comes as close to portraying the psychological universe inhabited by people like Ted Bundy as a work of fiction can. When you look at it that way, it’s incredibly frightening, because this isn’t fiction. This isn’t some guy in a hockey mask, chasing teenagers with large breasts. For all you know, you or your girlfriend could end up dead at the hands of someone just like the antagonist of this movie.

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We’re talking about the original Dutch version, right? Scared the bejeebers out of me, and my bejeebers are pretty firmly entrenched.

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I think it explores the darker side of obsessiveness as portrayed by the boyfriend as well. He cannot live with the unknown and he dwells in the past to the virtual exclusion of the present. I think what piques the murderer’s interest in him is that this guy has not been able to Let Go, even years after the disappearance. What’s so ironic and horrific is that the “closure” he’s looking for is far far worse than the gnawing uncertainty of simply Not Knowing.

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You think? I got the impression that after the guy’s new girlfriend left him, he was already “dead” in a sense, so whatever happened to him was irrelevant as long as he found out what had happened. So that was partly why the final revelation wasn’t that scary to me; he’d already decided to drink the drugged coffee, in effect saying “Whatever you do to me now is fine.”

But that does add a little creepy nuance to it that I hadn’t realized until just now. In a sense, the murderer was taking advantage of the husband just as much as he took advantage of the wife, because he knew how obsessed the husband was over the disappearance. So even though the husband agreed to go with him, and even though the murderer came right out and said he was a sociopath and confessed to the crime, he was still controlling the husband.

Thanks for the responses. After reading the OP again it sounds like I’m ragging on the movie or boasting that I’m not scared of anything, but that’s not the case. I was really wondering if there was some subtlety or nuance to the movie that I’d missed. It sounds like there wasn’t, really; I’ve just read too much Poe (The Cask of Amontillado scared the hell out of me when I had to read it in middle school) and seen The Silence of the Lambs too many times for this kind of thing to get me.

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I think one problem, from the American perspective, is that we wouldn’t allow ourseles to be victimized in that way by someone like this. At least not as it happens in the movie.

For example, I would simply have tortured the psycho until he told me what had happened.

That’s not to say there aren’t pyschopaths that could sneak up behind you and kill you. But that’s not what happened in the movie, so it makes the ending seem silly to many.

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I like this insight as the film as a metaphor for obssessivness, and how that can leave us “locked inside a little box, unable to breath or enjoy the world.”

The truth is, he was already in that box prior to his burial, as his obsession caused him to lose any real life he had. The killer simply finalized/symbolized his existing state of being.

Moral of the story? Move on, don’t dwell on the past. Live in the present. Accept some unknowns.

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Count me in as another one who walked out of that movie completely scared & freaked out. To this day, I count it as probably the only movie that I would never voluntarily watch again.

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And both movies are a metaphor for what Hollywood does to you. The remake, with its almost parody-level tacked on happy ending, was made by the same director! He sold his soul for a chance to work in Hollywood, and ended up trapped in the box of film cliches.