The Vanishing [Blu-ray]

George Sluizer's The Vanishing opens as a Dutch couple drive down the expressway for a cycling holiday in France. After the vehicle runs out of diesel within an express tunnel, the two get in a domestic quarrel and the husband angrily strands his wife near the vehicle, when going off and getting gasoline. When returning back to the car, the husband's wife is furious that he stranded her there, but ultimately he apologizes and she forgives him when arriving on a roadside gas station for gas and refreshments. When the wife goes into the station to buy beer and soft drinks, she inexplicably never returns. She disappears. At first the husband cannot believe what has happened, and he leaves a note on their car and goes searching for her. Where did she go? The authorities believe his wife probably decided to leave him, and even we the audience know of the domestic quarrel they recently had earlier establishing how impulsive the wife is, making it credible that she might as well just up and left the husband at any given moment. Her disappearance becomes an unhealthy obsession with the husband, and after three long years he simply needs to know what has happened to her, dead or alive.

What makes George Sluizer's The Vanishing absolutely brilliant is the way it builds an unrelenting amount of suspense, and at the same time gives the audience all the information we need to know. Dutch director George Sluizer and writer Tim Krabbe adapting from Krabbe's novel The Golden Egg, uses the conventional structure of its story and instead decide to take an unusual approach to the central mystery. In the beginning we follow the couple as they enter France for a cycling holiday, and suddenly after the disappearance of the wife the film takes a sudden shift from the narrative. It begins to follow Raymond Lemorne, a middle class man who is behind the wife's vanishing. Sluizer not only reveals the kidnapper early on thus defusing the most obvious point of suspense, but the director goes even further, and gives the audience an intimate access into the man's personal life. A respectable family man with a wife and two daughters, Raymond has secretly been plotting the abduction of a woman. These fascinating series of flashbacks will not only lead back to the disappearance of the wife, but also give audiences one of the most frightening and horrifying perspectives inside the mind of a sociopath. Add to that a down beat and merciless ending that is looked at by critics and cinephiles as one of the most ruthless and disturbing conclusions in all of cinematic history.