I know I posted the same film in this thread a few months back, however since I saw the movie again for the nth time, I found some new insights. Popped George Sluizer's Spoorloos (The Vanishing) again in my dvd player last night. Arguably, it is still the best paranoid thriller I've seen in my lifetime.
Spoorloos is far different from an abundance of run-of-the-mill thrillers that came up after it. It is a character study of a man that what we consider as a sociopath. It's remake, though, has this overemphasis to the sociopath just failed miserably. It could've been successful in anyway, but since Sluizer believed that Americans prefer a fairy-tale ending, he chose the road often travelled path and paid dearly for it. Anyway, Spoorloos presents not the factors that threatened Raymond's sanity, but rather the opposite. His threats to the society are clearly magnified. He's undoubtedly intelligent (taking for example how his body would react at certain circumstances, making notes on his pulse rates, etc.), his world revolves in numbers, and from what this explains to us how his mind processes it. There is a need for something, a void that only an devilish act could somehow fill. Maybe that is what his mind demands and his environment dictates him to do.
It's not the reality that you cannot trust anybody, but the fact that anybody can be someone like Raymond Lemorne. The paranoia is read between the lines, how such a harmless person could at a single twitch of a dysfunctional brain could send a sinister message to his helpless carcass. Thus, the deed could be performed without an iota of hesitation. And that, is certainly scary.
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