***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, Gene Bervoets, Johanna ter Steege, Gwen Eckhaus
screenplay by Tim Krabbé and George Sluizer, based on the novel The Golden Egg by Tim Krabbé
directed by George Sluizer
by Bryant Frazer What scares you the most? If you chew on that question for a while, then imagine a narrative that gets you to that terrible place, your story might look a little like the one told by The Vanishing (Spoorloos). Completed in 1988, this downbeat thriller didn't reach the U.S. until a couple of years later, when it coincidentally landed in New York within weeks of The Silence of the Lambs. The Vanishing isn't, strictly speaking, a serial-killer movie like Silence, though it shares that film's deep interest in the psychopathology of its villain. Like a good (and by "good," I mean "lurid") true-crime book, its interest is similarly piqued by the painful, quotidian details of an abhorrent crime.