Christy by Request — The Vanishing

It should have been a romantic escape — a chance to get away from the crowds and the heat of summer and ride bicycles through the French countryside. Instead, it ended before it even began, with the wife disappearing and the husband searching frantically for her, a quest that would obsess him for the next three years.

But “The Vanishing” isn’t so much a whodunit as it is a howdunit and a whydunit. We know early on who the abductor is. We watch him practice luring his prey, make mistakes and hone his technique. That’s what’s so astonishing about director George Sluizer’s 1988 French-Dutch film: the way it creates and maintains suspense from the beginning in deceptively simple ways. Tim Krabbe’s screenplay (which he adapted from his novella “The Golden Egg”) is composed of a series of steadily interlocking pieces that eventually snap together to present the whole picture. It’s an elegant, riveting piece of filmmaking.

Somehow, I’d never seen the original version of “The Vanishing” when it came up as the latest Christy by Request selection, the suggestion of James A. McDermid of Bristol, England (@birdnfox on Twitter). His idea actually prompted a lively Twitter debate, because at first I was unclear as to which version he wanted me to review. He’d said George Sluizer’s “The Vanishing,” but Sluizer also directed a 1993 English-language remake starring Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland, Sandra Bullock and Nancy Travis. Seems I chose the right one; he meant the original, and apparently the remake is woefully inferior. (It’s at 46 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, compared to 98 percent for the 1988 version.)

Folks have strong feelings about “The Vanishing,” and I can see why. Sluizer puts us on edge from the start, despite the seemingly inviting premise. Rex (Gene Bervoets) and Saskia (Johanna ter Steege) are a married couple on a road trip from Amsterdam to a country house in the south of France. They’re passing the time with word games but also bickering a bit, and the minimalist synth score makes the narrow, windy roads seem even more ominous. “Just look in your mirror,” he tells her with passive-aggressive annoyance as she pulls down the visor yet again to check her appearance.

But the playful, radiant Saskia is also feeling vulnerable, and she tells Rex of a nightmare she had that left her with an unbearable loneliness. (The fact that they’re both dressed in yellow as they sit side by side in the above picture is no accident.) That sensation only heightens when their car runs out of gas halfway through a long tunnel carved into a mountain in the middle of nowhere. Sluizer uses silence, stillness and darkness to chilling effect here — even though this sequence takes place in the daytime — making us feel as if we, too, are trapped. Saskia begs Rex not to leave her as he heads out of the tunnel to find a gas station; in a bit of foreshadowing, he returns with the fuel to find she’s left the car to wait in the sunlight, and he panics a bit at her absence.

They get over this awkwardness, though, and soon enough they’re flirting and teasing each other once more when they pull over at a rest stop for more gas and drinks. Again, Sluizer creates tension with his use of sound design. The place is packed with summertime travelers, and he establishes a rhythm between the hustle and bustle of tourists, the whoosh of passing cars and trucks, the noise of dogs barking and a soccer game on the radio that provides an underlying rat-a-tat. When Saskia takes a while coming back to the car from the convenience store, Rex starts to panic again. He looks everywhere for her in the crowd, but she’s nowhere to be found — and she has the car keys. The score from Henny Vrienten becomes more insistent as Rex’s search intensifies.

But then, just when the suspense becomes almost unbearable, Sluizer takes a breath and cuts away from Rex. Instead, he turns his focus toward a man we’d spied pulling into the rest stop, placing a fake cast on his arm and patiently waiting outside the convenience store. As we’ll learn, he’s Raymond Lamorne (a chilling Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), a seemingly mild-mannered husband and father of two teenage girls.

But beneath his blandly dumpy exterior lurks the wicked mind of a man who secretly fancies himself dashing and clever. It’s disturbing — but also darkly funny, in a way — to watch him practice the shpiel he’ll use on his potential targets, to measure the amount of chloroform he’ll need by testing it out on himself, to keep track of his heart rate as he builds up the nerve to pull off his crime.

Raymond repeatedly messes up and starts over again, and Sluizer is fascinated by the minutiae of this process. He depicts the attacker’s preparation in understated fashion, never overselling the drama of it, which makes it even more disturbing. And eventually, Raymond’s storyline will quietly collide with Rex’s as he begins sending the bereaved husband postcards, promising information on Saskia’s whereabouts if the two meet up. One such occasion, at an outdoor cafe, is a great example of how Sluizer keeps us hanging by not necessarily hitting the beats we might expect. Rex has shown up with his new girlfriend (Gwen Eckhaus), who’s surprisingly tolerant of his obsession. He’s waiting for the stranger who summoned him there to contact him, but no one ever does. When we see Raymond sitting a couple of tables away, we expect Sluizer to rack focus and shift from Rex in the foreground to Raymond behind him. He never does it, leaving a lingering feeling of tension. It’s subtle but effective as yet another method of keeping us guessing.

Sluizer slides steadily back and forth between Rex and Raymond until their paths finally cross in ways that are further complicated and unexpected. He accompanies the flashback reveal of what happened to Saskia with a soft, gentle piano melody, which makes the moment sad rather than terrifying. And the ending — which is famously a doozy — wraps up this story with a cosmic, eerily romantic twist. Apparently, Sluizer changed the ending for his 1993 version, making it less shocking. I think I’ll be passing on that one — even if it comes up by request.