The Vanishing (1988) on Netflix
Rex and Saskia, on holiday in France, stop at a busy rest area. Saskia goes in for drinks and never comes out. Rex searches for three years, then a stranger's postcard arrives.
- Netflix4.4/5
- IMDb7.6/1056,185 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes98%
Featurette
Plot summary
Rex Hofman and Saskia Wagter are married Amsterdammers who drive to France for a cycling holiday. They stop at a rest area when their car runs out of petrol. Rex promises never to abandon Saskia, and the two bury coins at the base of a tree. Saskia goes into the petrol station for drinks and does not come back. Rex spends three years searching, appealing to the public through the media, while his new girlfriend Lieneke supports his efforts. Postcards from an unknown writer invite him to a cafe in Nîmes, but the writer never appears. Some time earlier, Raymond Lemorne, a family man with a wife and two daughters, has been preparing to abduct a woman, buying an isolated house and rehearsing his methods.
Cast
- Gwen Eckhausas Lieneke
- Tania Latarjetas Denise
- Lucille Glennas Gabrielle
- Caroline Appéréas Cashier
- Didier Roussetas TV Journalist
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Vanishing (1988)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The Vanishing was the Netherlands' 1988 submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, but the Academy disqualified it for having too much French dialogue. The Dutch declined to send another film, leaving them unrepresented among foreign submissions for the first time since 1972.
- On The Vanishing, Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu made repeated jokes about co-star Johanna ter Steege and refused to speak English to her though she knew little French. When she threatened to drop out, director George Sluizer confronted him and the tension eased.
- Jean-Louis Trintignant was George Sluizer's first choice to play the kidnapper Raymond Lemorne but was unavailable, so Sluizer signed Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, who had already had a small role in his 1979 film Twice a Woman, after one meeting.
- Johanna ter Steege, in her feature debut, won the role of Saskia after a casting agent sent George Sluizer to see her in an Amsterdam student play: he decided she was right because her hair was a similar colour to his daughter's.
- George Sluizer and novelist Tim Krabbé fell out over the script, disagreeing about which scenes went where and how to tell the story. Sluizer stopped working with Krabbé and finished the script alone, citing the film rights he had bought, which angered Krabbé.
- George Sluizer shot The Vanishing largely on location in Nîmes, France and in the Netherlands on a budget of just US$165,000.
