The Vanishing

A Dutch couple stop at a French service station. She goes in for drinks and does not come out.

George Sluizer structures it so the audience knows the abductor from early on, and watches him practise: timing chloroform on himself, measuring, rehearsing an approach in a mirror. Raymond is a chemistry teacher with a family and a holiday home, and his motive is a philosophical experiment about whether he is capable of an act.

The film is quiet, sunlit and utterly without suspense mechanics, and the ending is one of the most upsetting in cinema because it is exactly what was advertised.

Kubrick reportedly called it the most terrifying film he had seen.

Sluizer remade it in Hollywood in 1993 with a happy ending, which is one of the strangest self-betrayals in film history.