spoorloos (1988)

spoorloos aka. the vanishing...first of all, what kind of awesome word is spoorloos? i need to learn me some dutch. so here's why i like this movie - it takes your classic suspense/mystery archetype and totally turns it on it's head. the setup is played out enough: a couple (rex and saskia) are on holiday when at a gas station one of them disappears. as much as the other searches for them they are nowhere to be found. poof. magic dust.

the thing about movies like these is that the suspense usually derives from trying to figure out who the kidnapper is and we suffer the rest of the movie with each revealing clue hungering for the climatic reveal towards the end (and often a triumphant reunion or at least the bad guy loses, right?). but the vanishing lays all its cards out on the table from the moment of the crime. we know, well before the tortured protagonist, who the kidnapper is and even what makes him tick. we dive into the man's family life, we see him plotting in notebooks and lecturing at school. in fact, he seems like a perfectly likable fellow. he's not a monster. he has kids. he makes mistakes. but maybe that makes him an even more sinister character. he could be anyone. your neighbor, your friend, your colleague. anyone.


boy those are some silly screengrabs. so anyways, the suspense, instead, comes from the interaction between rex, and the kidnapper, raymond. the movie suggests a distorted sort of stockholm syndrome where, instead of the victim becoming enamored with their captor, the survivor and the kidnapper share an intense connection. a connection based on obsession. on one hand you have raymond who obsessively plans out the crime and on the other you have rex who obsessively searches for the kidnapper. in the end, rex's dedication compels raymond to seek him out and make contact. this is when the real suspense unfolds. the slowly revealed answers to all of rex's questions...and ours! after all, in these movies don't we also play victim? aren't we also rex, searching for our lost love, his will imposed onto our own?


finally i just want to share this bit of dialogue that nicely expresses the underlying theme of the movie, that being fate.

saskia: my nightmare. i had it again last night.
rex: that you're inside a golden egg and you can't get out, and you float alone through space forever.
saskia: yes, the loneliness is unbearable...no. this time there was another golden egg flying through space. and if we were to collide, it'd be all over.

don't mess with the flying space egg, rex! it only means your doom! dooooooooom!

bonus image::


oh a running gag. how cute.

10th post anniversary! we did it!