Please note: This was screened in Nov 2017
One of the best films of the 80s, Dutch director George Sluizer's supremely disturbing and truly unsettling psychological thriller follows a young man’s obsessive search for his girlfriend who mysteriously disappears whilst on vacation, and her abductor, a mild-mannered professor with a clinically diabolical mind.
During a routine rest stop on an idyllic road trip, two young lovers - Rex and Saskia – become separated. Having stopped to purchase fuel at a local petrol station, bafflement turns to panic for Rex (Gene Bervoets) when Saskia (Johanna ter Steege) doesn’t return after going in to pay and he realises that his partner has truly, inexplicably, vanished. Years later, after putting up posters and handing out flyers, he remains desperate to find out the circumstances of her mysterious disappearance. Meanwhile, the watching perpetrator - intrigued by Rex’s obsessive searching - finally gets in touch, giving him what he both longs for and fears: the opportunity to learn first-hand of his girlfriend's fate.
With an unforgettable finale that’s lost none of its potency to unnerve and unsettle (Stanley Kubrick told Sluizer that he thought The Vanishing was more frightening than The Shining), this masterpiece of suspense is a brilliantly chilling study of both the nature of obsession and the nightmarish potential for perversity and evil in the everyday.