Spoorloos / The Vanishing – review

Noah Vale recounts this eighties European chiller, and reminds us of one of the scariest characters committed to cinema.

Raymond Lemorne: terrifyingly normal

SPOORLOOS / THE VANISHING (1988)

DIRECTOR: George Sluizer

COUNTRY: Netherlands, France

RUNNING TIME: 107 mins

WATCH IT IF YOU LIKE: Don’t Look Now

“WHAT’S the scariest film monster then?”

My mate Joe has a habit of asking these very direct, almost confrontational questions apropos of not very much while we drink in our local. This was one such question a few weeks ago.

We mulled over the candidates – such as a knife-wielding psychopath and a man-eating alien – in a fashion one would expect of two middle-aged lads who’d grown up watching video nasties and X-rated Halloween all-nighters at our provincial fleapit.

It was only later that night as I was turning off the bedside lamp that the correct answer came to me. Raymond Lemorne.

Raymond is the person who embodies the most petrifying aspects of the human character. He plays out his fantasies not for blood lust, or due to an extremely violent mental disorder; he does it merely to discover if they can be carried out. He is a successful, seemingly well-adjusted family man, but he hides a very, very dark secret.

In the 1988 Dutch/French film Spoorloos (Released under the name The Vanishing in the US), Raymond is also the at-first unknown nemesis of Rex, a young Dutchman on holiday in France with his girlfriend Saskia. They stop at a busy service station and briefly separate, but Saskia does not come back, vanishing without a trace.

Throughout Spoorloos, there is an overpowering sense of menace.

What follows is an examination of obsession. We are introduced to Raymond, the kidnapper who may or may not be Saskia’s murderer. His experiments with abduction methods are shown – at one point almost comically passing out on his own chloroform – and the rehearsals leading up to the abduction.

We then jump forward three years and are reintroduced to Rex, now world-weary and harbouring a deep-seated obsession to discover the truth about Saskia’s fate. Following an appearance on TV appealing for information, Rex is contacted by Raymond who ultimately promises to reveal Saskia’s fate to him but only on his terms. The story has been dark up to this point, but we are now taken to somewhere much, much darker.

Throughout Spoorloos, there is an overpowering sense of menace. However, this is wrought not from conventional cat-and-mouse chases. It is instead gut-twisting feeling of something being just out of eye shot, almost able to reach but destined not to be. The end result is a slow-burning oppression, built from the interaction of the characters, and the realisation that, however engrossing, things will not end prettily.

The main performances are uniformly excellent. Gene Bervoets plays the descent of Rex superbly, showing the brutal effects of his character’s inability to move forward with his life without the answers he needs. As Saskia, Johanna ter Steege is only on screen for a matter of minutes but her interplay with Bervoets gives us a perfect example of how young couples in love really are with each other; at once playful and happy, but prone to the niggling, petty tiffs that result from being together on holiday.

And then there is Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu as Raymond. He plays this sociopath as a fully-formed, well-rounded individual – a slightly quirky looking middle-aged man one would walk past without a second thought, but one who would perhaps help by offering directions in the street or by retrieving a dropped coin.

Raymond is mundane: he has no skeletons in his cupboard, no horrific childhood trauma that has shaped him into a slavering maniac.

He is in fact quite the opposite of this, he is a someone like me or you. But someone that wants to carry out unspeakable crimes to see if they can be achieved.

Isn’t that truly monstrous?