THE VANISHING (Sluzier, 1988)

A man and his wife go on a driving holiday and stop at a rest stop. The woman goes into the store and gets some beer. The man stays at the car. The woman never comes out. The man spends three years searching for her and one day, the kidnapper contacts him and tells him he can show him what he did to her. What would you do? Is the searching more important than the actual truth, the knowledge of what happened? Or would you lose something when the search ended? THE VANISHING takes these fairly essential questions and plays them out in the form of an epic French horror film. It is French, which means that people say things like "The loneliness was unbearable" but, no shit, this is a seriously wonderful film that everyone should see.

THE VANISHING has, simply put, the greatest twist ending and one of the greatest sequences in all of horror history. I won't give it away for anyone who's never seen it, because the effect works best when you have no clue what's coming. Suffice it to say, the man's going to end up wishing he didn't know what happened. The ending is nasty and sad and beautiful, all at once.

But, again, the real beauty lies in the getting there. THE VANISHING gives away the identity of the kidnapper within the first ten minutes of the film. The question, then, isn't whodunit, but whydhedoit? Isn't that so much more interesting, anyway? The plot folds out and unpeels itself slowly, revealing rich layers typically not explored within the horror genre. There is no gore, no rape, no monsters and no explosions. There is simply the dark heart of man, the knowledge that we are all capable of good and evil, amazing highs and debilitating lows.

Sluzier's characters spend their lives attempting to find truth or perfection, and by the end, they both realize that neither is worthwhile, that truth is void and trying to find it is pointless. In the end, all there is is vast emptiness and darkness, and all the knowledge in the world can't change that.