In 1988, the director George Sluizer released a movie that influenced generations of filmmakers. So much so that Stanley Kubrick himself stated that this was the most terrifying movie he had ever seen. The Vanishing (or Spoorloos) is a story about loss and the aftermath of trauma, as well as how a killer’s mind works. The movie starts out as a thriller and slowly becomes a horror movie in a distinctly specific way, creating a breathtaking narrative that is impossible to forget.

The Vanishing explored deep subjects in its course, such as existential dread and the inability to grieve. A thriller without blood and gore, The Vanishing simply makes the audience experience what the protagonist is enduring, creating a haunting adventure for the viewer. After going on a weekend trip, a young Dutch couple is violently separated in a gas station: the wife went to pick a beer and a soda to continue their trip, but she never came back. The story follows the husband as he tries to make sense of what really happened.

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The Vanishing is a masterpiece that was able to uniquely tell a kidnapping story while dealing with the feelings that come out of these traumatic moments. Here is why this is movie any thriller fans should watch.

Existential Dread

     Argos Films

Existential dread is a psychological (or sometimes simply philosophical) event where a person can’t find meaning in their pain during difficult times in their life and has feelings of hopelessness, despair, and even fear. These emotions and lack of answers to their questions lead to a deep fear of their future, as if something awful is waiting for them, making them unmotivated with no sense of control over their lives. Having an episode of existential dread is common, and taking into consideration the Covid-19 pandemic, it is expected that a lot of people have experienced this deep dread over the past couple of years.

​​​​​​This phenomenon is very common after someone experiences a trauma, but it can happen to everyone, especially intellectuals. Because of that, there are various films that try to convey this feeling of loss of hope and the desperation to overcome purposelessness. Among them, The Vanishing is definitely one of the best to depict this phenomenon and the feelings it awakens. It is especially interesting to watch the film after experiencing an existential dread that took over the world back in 2020, and shows how much Sluizer was able to convey it through the screen, even 34 years ago.

The Vanishing

The main topic of The Vanishing, and what propels the protagonist to act and move the story forward, is his feeling of existential dread after losing his wife. The audience gets to know the couple while they’re traveling during the weekend. Out of nowhere, Saskia (Johanna Ter Steege) is kidnapped, leaving Rex (Gene Bervoets) alone and in despair: there is no apparent way of getting her back. Rex loses all sense of forward-thinking desire and focuses his life’s mission on knowing what happened in the past. He is unable to have lasting relationships and, in a sense, stops really living after this event.

Rex says at one point in the movie that he has two options on how to proceed with his life. He can either choose that his wife is living a healthy and fun life away from him and he never finds out what happened at the gas station, or that she is dead and he finds out what kind of violence she had to endure. He decides that he’d rather know that she is truly dead than continue to live with the uncertainty he has experienced every day over three years.

The Sad Need For Certainty in The Vanishing

When he finally meets Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), his wife’s supposed murderer, Lemorne makes an absurd proposition: he will tell Rex everything he did to his wife only if Rex undergoes the same things Saskia did. Rex then decides that he would rather have to go through the same cruel experience (while not having a single clue of what that might be like) than spend another hour without knowing what happened.

The movie does such a good job of telling this story that by the end the audience is just as eager as Rex to know what happened. The existential dread blends itself between the character and the viewer (who, like Rex, keeps watching because they want to know what happens), that even though they know it is a foolish proposition to take, they understand the character when he does accept it. And this is why it is such a powerful story and one of the best depictions of existential dread in cinema history.

Other Existential Movies

     Paramount Pictures

Existential dread has been explored in various films; some do a very good job, and others not so much. A great example that is quite different from The Vanishing in how it approaches this problem, as well as focusing more on the depression that comes from having an episode of existential dread, is the controversial American Beauty. The protagonist’s life has lost all meaning to him until he falls in love with an underage girl, and we see the emptiness buried within everyone else he knows in their suburban life.

Another example that focuses more on existential crisis rather than dread but that is still a great watch is The Truman Show. A very different film, this excellent Jim Carrey movie follows the quite literal existential dilemma of a man realizing that his entire reality is completely meaningless and seemingly hopeless, as Carrey’s character realizes that he’s in a television show surrounded by actors paid to like him. These are only two examples of movies that deal with the same essential problem of The Vanishing (the disappearance of meaning, and the desperation to understand that broken reality), and they’re worth watching if you want very different takes on this kind of story.