The Vanishing (1988)

Sociopath [soh-see-uh-path]
noun 
A person with a psychopathic personality whose personality is antisocial, often criminal, and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.

 On a balcony it would be normal for a man to entertain the idea of jumping off, possibly seriously harming himself. Of course he does not as his animal instincts instructs him to preserve his body. Perhaps it is simply predestination that he does not jump. But what if a person were to make the leap simply because he does not accept the idea that he was destined to remain stationary? This person is the sociopath, and Dutch director George Sluizer plants him as the central character of his terrifying character study.

On a holiday to France from Amsterdam, Saskia is kidnapped at a busy rest station. Her lover, Rex, goes on a hunt for the perpetrator that takes three years, all the while fueled by mysterious postcards from the kidnapper. After several failed encounters, the man finally decides to meet Rex face to face and explain why and how he pulled off his perfect crime.

The criminal is Raymond, a university professor, a husband, and a father of two. Although looking at his 80's, European style and imposing physique I might personally have had trouble starting a conversation with the man, he is a most unsuspecting person. His house is large and clean, his daughters are lovely. He is smart, well regarded, and although his family suspect he has a mistress, one would never imagine that he would be the type of person to drug a young woman in broad daylight and take her back to his isolated summer residence.

A period of three years is very long time and we get to share little of it with Raymond. The director simply allows us to imagine what his life was like on a day to day basis knowing that he did something heinous but an action not shown or described. However, we do get to spend a long and very uncomfortable hour and a half examining this seemingly normal man as he meticulously plans out his actions over the course of months, all shown through flashbacks.

I have a morbid curiosity of for what people will do in order to feel sexually gratified--I have even written a play about it And, indeed, this film reminded me very much of "Mod Girl" (almost uncomfortably so), though it obviously came out considerably before I wrote my play. But why this man does what he does is not for sex, at least not that we are told about. Instead, it is about a man who commits his crime simply because a crime is there to be committed. He is a boy standing over an anthill carrying a very large magnifying glass and the sun is blazing too hot for us to see what it really is that he's doing.

The film is slow, but usually very interesting. Rex's hunt for a girl long gone becomes dry, especially as he now has a very pretty girlfriend and yet only talks about Saskia. However, when the plot is about Raymond it is engrossing. The clues we pick up are startling and made me fidgety in my chair. Watching him employing different tactics to try to get unsuspecting girls into his car was deeply disturbing and made me immediately think of "Silence of the Lambs" which no doubt took considerable influence from this film.

The pace quickens in the third act, and seems to go from a three to a ten in a matter of minutes. It culminates in one the scariest, most shocking climaxes I have ever seen; it left me literally on the edge of my seat. Some will have trouble suffering a lot of talking and a slow, unnecessary setup, but good things come to those who wait. Perhaps it is a sign of our own sociopathy that we eagerly wait to the end to know what an insane man will do to a helpless girl, but I suppose I'm okay with that.

3/4