The Vanishing (1988)

The general public has had a fascination for serial killers for longer than I’ve been alive. They are an unflinching reflection of cultural and primal fears whose tales of pure evil done on innocents have captured the macabre aspects of our collective psyche in ways most would deny in polite company. Countless upon countless of documentaries, books, TV specials, interviews and academic journals have been dedicated to the matter but the film is an area where its exploration has been endlessly fascinating. It’s an obsession that goes two ways I believe with organised serial killers being as dedicated to the craft as the likes of Hannibal Lecter prove in Silence Of The Lambs (1991) but none delve so intimately into their psyche, via naturalistic colouring and writing, as that as Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) in George Sluizer’s (The Vanishing).

We begin with a Dutch couple, Rex Hoffman (Gene Bervoets) and Saskia, on holiday in France arriving at a rest stop. They both promise to one another that they will never leave each other before Saskia makes her way to the petrol to buy drinks. She never returns and for three years since Rex continues to search for her.  We watch as he toils away at this obsession which breaks apart his relationships and unknowingly feeds into what drives the serial killer when he makes his search efforts known during a TV interview.  Although he is a unique and extreme case he does swim in the same waters as the ever-curious public. It’s wanting to know what the answers are. They are questions about ourselves fundamentally about how we function but it is only one side of the story.

The film is more concerned with the inner machinations of Raymond. His routine, his family relationships and his work life are under our guise, than the spectacle of what he is. He is a self-diagnosed sociopath and a highly functional one at that. Nothing he does is done out of impulse, he is calculated, he is methodical and rather perceptive but not perfect. People around him always tend to view him with suspicion but never guess what his true nature is which is true to the form of most organised serial killers. His wardrobe perfectly complements his nature as well. He is always wearing blue of some kind be it a blue blazer, button-up shirt or suit pants. The blue also serves to disarm the people around him and help sell the image that he is nothing more than a professional white-collared family man. He literally wears his cold disposition on his sleeve.

Red is a colour that’s used as a sword of Damocles throughout the narrative. It serves as a reminder that beyond his demeanour belies a sinister, dangerous side to him. He never directly wears anything red but he they are in every scene he is in, be it his car, his lunch-box or women he shares the environment with. Given how we are so hard-wired to recognise anything red, its use is hard not to notice so inform us that despite the appearances people will always reveal their true selves. Yellow completes the films use of triadic colours although it’s mostly associated with the secondary protagonist, Rex.  All the scenes with heightened emotions in the narrative are his and they’re always tinged in yellow from the street lights. When he is emotionally vulnerable it appears and serves to unsettle us but also serve as a bad omen of what his and our search may yield.

Ultimately The Vanishing reveals that our search into the darkness of man can be a self destructive one. Some serial killers may be predestined to be what they are but must we reward nature for such creations with the ever growing modern day attention economy? Perhaps the truth is something we can’t grasp without damning ourselves in the process. Perhaps it’s not worth it all as Sluzier hints at with its chilling and haunting ending.