The Vanishing
Short description
Rex and Saskia are a young Dutch couple driving through France on holiday. At a busy service station Saskia goes off on her own, and in those few minutes she disappears without a trace. Three years pass with no word of what happened to her. Rex has almost let the matter go when he begins receiving messages from a man who claims to know the truth about Saskia and offers to show him, on one condition: that Rex submit to the same experience she did. The film follows Rex's willingness to follow that demand and the unnerving figure behind it.
George Sluizer directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Tim Krabbé, and also produced it with Anne Lordon. It was the first feature in Sluizer's directing career according to the records here, arriving before Utz, his later English-language remake of the same story, and The Commissioner. Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu plays Raymond Lemorne, with Gene Bervoets as Rex, Johanna ter Steege as Saskia and Gwen Eckhaus, Pierre Forget and Bernadette Le Saché in supporting roles.
The film runs 106 minutes and holds a 7.6 out of 10 on IMDb across some 55,000 votes, with a 7.4 on TMDB from a far smaller pool of 874; a critics' score of 8.3 from 51 reviews sits above both, so the response was strongest among reviewers.
What's left behind the scenes
- Tim Krabbe, the author of the source novel 'The Golden Egg' (1984) and the screenplay for George Sluizer's (1932-2014) film based on it, 'The Vanishing' (1988), based the plot on a newspaper article he once read about a tourist who disappeared after buying chewing gum at a gas station during a bus stop in France. Police searched for two days, but the woman was never found. Ten years later, Krabbe conducted his own investigation and discovered that the woman had been found alive and well the very next day, simply having gotten on the wrong bus after the stop. Krabbe even called her to thank her for the story.
- During filming, the money allocated for the cast and crew's meals ran out, and George Sluizer had to turn to representatives of the French criminal underworld for help. They lent him the money, but stated that the debt would have to be repaid, or he would face problems.
- In 1988, the film was submitted for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film representing Denmark, but it was disqualified because it contained too much dialogue in French to qualify for the Danish submission.
- Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu (1949-2010) employed somewhat unconventional methods when working with actors. He deliberately started a fight with Gene Bervoets shortly before filming the scene where their characters fight, to make Bervoets' anger appear as genuine and natural as possible, and in the scene where he gives drugs to Johanna ter Steege's character, he held her so tightly that she couldn't breathe, and she genuinely experienced a panic attack.
- Gene Bervoets was actually locked in a real coffin and the coffin was piled high with sandbags to prevent him from escaping, ensuring his attempts to save himself didn't appear contrived.
- Director George Sluizer shot an alternative ending to the film in which Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu's character is caught by the police. However, this ending was never used or shown, as the director decided it diminished the impact of the preceding scenes.
- In 1988, the film was submitted for the "Oscar" award in the "Best Foreign Language Film" category from the Netherlands, but it was disqualified, with the stated reason being that it contained too much dialogue in French.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
