The Vanishing (Spoorloos)

<div><b>Book tickets for two or more of our&nbsp;<a href="https://www.filmhouse.org.uk/bleak-week-cinema-of-despair">Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair</a>&nbsp;films in the same transaction to receive a discount!</b></div><div><br></div><div>Has anyone who has seen this film ever stopped at a motorway service station/rest stop and not thought of it? I know I haven’t, such is the depth of its chill. A reminder, should we need it, of the sheer fragility of any single human life and how arrogant we are to imagine that we might ever actually get through it, or, rather, how easy it would be not to. As the film’s 'terrifyingly mundane’ abductor, Raymond, would have it, “<i>the best plans can be wiped out at any moment by what we call fate”</i>. The abduction is only the beginning as the one-left-behind’s desperate, obsessive pursuit of closure leads him, and us, inexorably, to perhaps the most disturbing ending in all of cinema.&nbsp;&nbsp;</div><div><br></div><div><i>Written by Rod White, Programme Director</i></div><div><br></div><div>A superb psychodrama which twists the slenderest of plots into a hellish exploration of human potential. On a driving holiday in France, a young Dutch couple, Saskia and Rex, stop at a service station to refuel; as Rex waits, Saskia walks to a nearby toilet, and vanishes without trace. Three years later, an embittered Rex finds himself drawn into a nightmarish relationship with Saskia's awesomely mundane abductor, Raymond Lemorne, who, via taunting postcards, promises to reveal the fate of his lost love... A beautifully understated study of obsession that investigates the edges of rationality and the destructive capacity of idealistic devotion. At the heart of its icy spell is Donnadieu's utterly plausible evocation of everyday madness, a resolutely banal picture of evil. Sluizer's direction is seamless throughout, effortlessly juggling domesticity and damnation as the film marches on to its horrific end.</div>ThrillerPT1H46M152026-06-22
Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu
Gene Bervoets
Johanna ter Steege
George Sluizer
George Sluizer
Anne Lordon
The Vanishing (Spoorloos)"The Vanishing (Spoorloos)"

Showtimes

June 22, 8:30 pm

Filmhouse Cinema